IPCC summaries called too conservative
Some scientists and environmental groups say political meddling has watered down the take-home message in leading climate-change reports.
Some critics claim that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) underplays the dangers of global warming in its widely cited summaries for policy makers. That charge comes on the heels of the announcement that IPCC will share the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former vice president Al Gore for "efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change."
Saying that key scientific findings are missing from the official summaries, the conservation organization WWF has released its own versions of two recent IPCC summaries. The group added information gleaned from the full versions of the reports, including references to the likelihood of more hurricanes, droughts, and floods.
IPCC recently released the final synthesis section of its 2007 assessment report, the fourth such study it has produced since 1990. The three working groups that write the report negotiate the wording of the summaries with government delegates.
"The synthesis report did a spectacularly good job of tying together the disparate expertise of the three working groups and developing a coherent message," says Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University, a lead author on the IPCC report. The individual working-group summaries "could have teased out clearer statements" on some points, he says, notably the rate of global sea-level rise. "But that's not a reflection of anything the governments did," he says. The IPCC process has at times been frustrating for some scientists, such as Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA, who filed a formal protest and left the room during tense negotiations earlier this year.
Government delegations from all IPCC member countries meet in a plenary session to approve each summary "line by line (sentence by sentence)," according to the IPCC website. Lead scientific authors of the report must reach agreement with the delegations on every point.
WWF says that this process cuts "vital facts and important information" from summaries, which are quoted more often than the 3000-page full report. "These working-group reports clearly laid the case for deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. The summaries dilute this," says WWF climate program director Hans Verolme.
