Fragilecologies

Tag: IPCC

  • “An IPCC dilemma: Who to trust talking to the media, its critics or its colleagues? ” Mickey Glantz (July 12, 2010)

    “An IPCC dilemma: Who to trust talking to the media, its critics or its colleagues? ” Mickey Glantz (July 12, 2010)

    The title of this editorial is a play on words with a bottom-line message: whom should you keep your eyes on — your enemies (critics) and or your colleagues, when it involves talking with the media about IPCC’s 5th Assessment findings.

    A colleague of mine, Ed Carr at the University of South Carolina, received a letter from the Head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) cautioning those selected to prepare the next (5th) Climate Change Assessment Report not to talk to the media, leaving that task to the IPCC Secretariat.

    Ed Carr wrote (his blog in just below this one):

    So I [Carr] was dismayed this morning to receive a letter, quite formally titled “Letter No.7004-10/IPCC/AR5 from Dr Pachauri, Chaiman of the IPCC”, that might set such transparency back. While the majority of the letter is a very nice congratulations on being selected as part of the IPCC, the third paragraph is completely misguided:

    “I would also like to emphasize that enhanced media interest in the work of the IPCC would probably subject you to queries about your work and the IPCC. My sincere advice would be that you keep a distance from the media and should any questions be asked about the Working Group with which you are associated, please direct such media questions to the Co-chairs of your Working Group and for any questions regarding the IPCC to the secretariat of the IPCC.”

    It is clear that the IPCC still has a problem. It claims the problem is with the media, or at the very least it strongly hint at that. However, in this day and age, if one type of news medium does not catch IPCC scientists off guard another type will. That is what the media is paid to do. I would argue that secrets are hard to keep from the media and are hard to be kept by the media.

    A political ‘rule of thumb’ is that ships of state (eg, governments) tend  by metaphor to leak from the top; that is, leak confidential information to reporters either to reinforce a political position or to undermine it. I would argue that the same rule applies to the IPCC as a scientific climate-change- related ship of state. Leaks about scientific deliberations came from within the IPCC science community. Partly it is due to the persistence of reporters and science writers and partly it is because of the egos of some scientists who thrive on media attention. [NB: climategate was the result of hacked emails and NOT the result of loose lips (off-hand comments) by IPCC scientists (as far as we know).]

    So, it seems that the email directive and the defense of issuing it by the Head of the IPCC makes little sense. instead of embracing openness with the general public, the IPCC leadership has chosen to cast another shadow about the objectivity of the forthcoming 5th scientific climate change assessment. Is there something to hide? I don’t think so. Will the public be led to believe that there is something to hide? I think so.

    Instead of emerging from the climategate situation feeling exonerated and with heads held high, the IPCC leaders seem to haves come out of it paranoid and less secure about how its work presented by the media to the public.


    Transparency is the best cure for the IPCC’s image. Even with critics at the door and media as well, the best strategy to pursue is to pursue openness. Good objective science will win out. Policing the comments of your colleagues (eg, friends) will likely generate frustration and resentment thereby converting friends into “frenemies” (friendly enemies who support IPCC science but not the IPCC process).

  • GUEST Editorial by Edward Carr. July 9, 2010. “Apparently, we have learned nothing . . .”

    GUEST Editorial by Edward Carr (University of South Carolina) July 9, 2010

    “Apparently, we have learned nothing . . .”

    www.edwardrcarr.com/opentheechochamber/

    I am part of Working Group II of the 5th Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As some of you might know, Working Group II of the previous Assessment Report (AR4) was the one that caught a lot of flak for problematic conclusions and references regarding Himalayan Glacier melt and whatnot. On one hand, these were stupid errors that should have been corrected in the review process (which will be part of my job in AR5).  On the other, they really did not affect the overall conclusions or quality of the report – they just gave those who continue to have an issue with the idea of climate change an opening to attack the report.

    Part of the problem for the IPCC is a perceived lack of openness – that something is going on behind closed doors that cannot be trusted.  This, in the end, was at the heart of the “climategate” circus – a recent report has exonerated all of the scientists implicated, but some people still believe that there is something sinister going on.

    There is an easy solution to this – complete openness.  I’ve worked on global assessments before, and the science is sound.  I’ve been quite critical of the way in which one of the reports was framed (download “Applying DPSIR to Sustainable Development” here), but the science is solid and the conclusions are more refined than ever.  Showing people how this process works, and what we do exactly, would go a long way toward getting everyone on the same page with regard to global environmental change, and how we might best address it.

    So I was dismayed this morning to receive a letter, quite formally titled “Letter No.7004-10/IPCC/AR5 from Dr Pachauri, Chaiman of the IPCC”, that might set such transparency back.  While the majority of the letter is a very nice congratulations on being selected as part of the IPCC, the third paragraph is completely misguided:

    “I would also like to emphasize that enhanced media interest in the work of the IPCC would probably subject you to queries about your work and the IPCC. My sincere advice would be that you keep a distance from the media and should any questions be asked about the Working Group with which you are associated, please direct such media questions to the Co-chairs of your Working Group and for any questions regarding the IPCC to the secretariat of the IPCC.”

    This “bunker mentality” will do nothing for the public image of the IPCC.  The members of my working group are among the finest minds in the world.  We are capable of speaking to the press about what we do without the help of minders or gatekeepers. I hope my colleagues feel the same way, and the IPCC sees the light . . .

  • “’Robocopping’ the Planet: Geo-engineering the Planet’s Climate system,” Mickey Glantz 1 June 2010

    Mickey Glantz,

    1 June 2010

    Almost twenty-five years ago, the Hollywood movie Robocop appeared on the silver screen. The plot summary was quite simple, according to IMDB: “In a dystopic** and crime ridden Detroit, a terminally wounded cop returns to the police force as a powerful cyborg,” part human and part machine. robocop-bigposter-orig

    It seems that the scientific community and governments around the world are following the Robocop plot, applying it, by analogy, to plant and animal species around the entire planet. For example, we continue to drive animals in the wild towards extinction but try to save a few for our zoos. Other species, known to be endangered, have continually increased in value to those who seek their products – the rhino for its horn (an alleged aphrodisiac in Asia) and the lowland gorilla for its paws (used as ash trays!) are two prominent examples. Less well known are the wetlands that are everywhere being drained and the rainforests that are worldwide being cut down for political and economic reasons. Indeed, we persistently destroy good, productive farmland and then attempt to grow the same amounts of food in less suitable soils and climates.

    These are but a few apt examples around the planet of the Robocop analogy: we destroy different parts of the earth’s surface then we resort more and more to technologies to create artificial environments to replace those environments we have destroyed. This growing trend has led to a nasty cycle wherein artificially created ‘technovironments’ are becoming more valuable to people, both economically and perceptually, than those natural environments that are being replaced. In recent years, this situation has emerged in consideration of the global climate system.

    A couple of thousand scientists from around the globe have published their consensus view that many human activities are now producing greenhouse gases that are intensifying the naturally occurring greenhouse effect. As a result, the atmosphere of planet earth is heating up. The concern is that this heating will increase temperatures by at least 2 to 3 degrees Celsius or more by the end of the century if not sooner. The question, of course, is whether or not societies and the ecosystems on which they depend can adapt to the changes that accompany climate change, especially at the rapid rates at which those changes could realistically occur. The consensus of those couple of thousand scientists who participated in the 4th assessment report of the Nobel Prize winning IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) appears to be that societies will be unable to keep up with those changes; even so, there is as yet apparently not enough political will to stop the industrial and land-use practices that continue to produce such greenhouse gas emissions.

    Enter Robocop . . . by analogy. The response of some key members of the scientific communities in both the USA and Europe has been to propose various ways (theoretical conjectures, really) to control the planet’s climate, either by ratcheting down the temperature or at least controlling it so that it does not turn into a runaway greenhouse effect. They have proposed mimicking volcanic eruptions by spewing aerosols into the stratosphere, evaporating sea water to brighten lower level clouds that prevent the sun’s rays from reaching the earth’s surface, putting millions of mirrors in space, creating artificial trees to suck carbon dioxide out of the air, and so on.

    The reality is that a field of artificial carbon-sucking tree-like technological devices is not a forest. Nor will it ever be. Pumping ever-increasing amounts of societally emitted greenhouse gases into the air is converting our atmosphere into an artificial (non-natural) environment. The question is when is a cyborg no longer a cyborg? At what point does replacing yet another living part of the planet with yet another technological device, further converting the cyborg – which is, at this point, partially natural life and partially designed machine – turn the entire planet into little more than a crudely assembled technological device? When does the earth as ‘technovironment’ become a much less-than-perfect “Robocopy” of the original living system so well described by James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis?James Lovelock

    Geoengineering schemes are being proposed because governments seem to have put on the back-burner efforts to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. They are likely to muddle along until a full-blown climate crisis occurs. They will continue to build coal-fired power plants, while trying to figure out how to suck that excess carbon dioxide out of the air. They will continue to cut down forests and try to manufacture artificial trees. They will do anything they can to continue “business as usual” and therefore they will not reduce the carbon emissions on which they now depend for economic development. In other words, their true interest lies in “Robocopping the planet’s climate.” If adaptations through such science fictions are allowed to continue, humanity is lost.

    The reality is that modern humans have not been around very long. Policymakers should be reminded each day of this truism: while we need much of the natural environment kept intact, it does not need us at all.
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    ** Dystopia: An imagined universe (usually the future of our own world) in which a worst-case scenario is explored; the opposite of utopia. Dystopic stories have been especially influential on postmodernism, as writers and filmmakers imagine the effects of various aspects of our current postmodern condition, for example, the world’s take-over by machines (The Matrix); the social effects of the hyper-real (Neuromancer); a society completely run by media commercialism (The Running Man); the triumph of late capitalism (Blade Runner); bureaucratic control run amok (Brazil, 1984); and so on.