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Climate Scientists Defend IPCC Peer Review as Most Rigorous in History
The peer review process at the heart of the UN climate science panel is one of the most rigorous in the "history of science," climate scientists said as they attempted to shore up trust in an institution that has been battered in the media.
"It is hard to conceive of a more comprehensive and transparent process than that used by the IPCC," Neville Nicholls, a climate scientist and lead writer on parts of the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told reporters Thursday.
An error in the 3,000-page IPCC report that exaggerated the rapid melting of the Himalayan glaciers has triggered claims of sloppiness in the panel’s peer-review procedures, and the UN said today it would appoint an independent panel to review the planet's top climate science body.
The world's climate change skeptics have gone a step farther, though, taking advantage of the gaffe to promote their point of view that global warming is not real.
Scientists say that the calls for substantial reform of the IPCC's expert and government peer-review process by opponents are overkill.
"Peer review can certainly be trusted," said Paul Beggs, a climate scientist from Australia's Macquarie University. This is particularly true of the IPCC peer review process, he said, which is "arguably the most rigorous and transparent peer review process in the history of science."
Nicholls, a professor at Monash University in Victoria, Australia, said the IPCC 2007 Fourth Assessment report was subjected to several rigorous tiers of review. The study cites over 10,000 papers from the scientific literature, "most of which have already been through the peer-review process to get into the scientific literature."
The report went through four separate reviews and received 90,000 comments from 2,500 reviewers, all of which are publicly available, along with the responses of the authors, Nicholls said.
Kurt Lambeck, a geophysicist at the Australian National University and president of the Australian Academy of Science, said the Himalayan blunder is one of a few that "slipped through." The other that skeptics have seized on involved the percentage of the Netherlands that is below sea level, a number that was provided by the Dutch government itself.
Occasional errors are not surprising, said Kevin Walsh, a professor of meteorology at the University of Melbourne.
"Even rigorous peer review can let things slip through, or assess work incompletely," Walsh said. "It's not surprising, therefore, that in the several thousand pages of the IPCC reports, a few problems have been found with the review process."
The fact that the error did not make it into the report summary — which contains all the findings of importance to world governments that are crafting climate regulation — should lessen the impact of it, the scientists say.
The summaries, they argue, are key.
"Every sentence in these summaries is discussed and argued about and finally agreed by consensus — not a vote — by scientists and representatives from more than 130 governments," said Nicholls. "Many of these government representatives are also scientists."
Steven Sherwood, an atmospheric physicist at the University of New South Wales, said the whole debacle has been "horribly" overblown. The Himalayan melting claims that caused the controversy were "so minor," he said. Echoing Nicholl's comments, Sherwood said the mistakes "were not even mentioned in the report's Executive Summary. The executive summaries are vetted very, very thoroughly" and "could not have errors of this kind."
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World Health
Australian International Plant Protection Convention aims to protect the plant species through its coordination and involvement with international plant health standards. Should they vary from the international plant health standards then measures and monitors are established and rigorously assessed. AIPPC is designed to raise and evaluate its role in coordinating best practice for our plant species. The relationship the plants have on the planet lifeline is paramount, but not in isolation of the effects of modern living. We cannot presume blame to AIPPC for the doings of our Industrialists and Commercial activities. Nor can this body be held accountable for the overall health of the world. They have a small but key responsibility in the scheme of the world health.
warming is just a natural event?
J Ryan
You probably hold the Opinion that global warming it just a natural event, because the earth has warmed and cooled many times in the past. This is a popular opinion among so called skeptics. I think you should consider the following.
You've heard of clean coal technology called CCS( carbon capture and sequestration ) pumping CO2 into the earth to sequester it? The idea is to take it out of the short term carbon cycle, in which carbon cycles through the atmosphere, water, soil and living things, and to lock it away in the earth. Mother nature has been sequestering carbon for a long time. Carbon (from life forms that die etc.) precipitates out of the short term cycle and becomes coal and oil. The coal that we burn took 65 million years to accumulate by this process. It is one of the things that has kept the carbon cycle in a balance that supports life as we know it for a long long time. The coal is a carbon sink in the long term carbon cycle which is on timescales of millions of years like tectonic plate movement.
We are now reversing this process, releasing the carbon as CO2 back into atmosphere and hence back into the short term carbon cycle. But we are doing it in a few hundred years. This is like a nanosecond in geological time. This has never happened before. It is probably unprecedented in the history of the planet.
So when people argue that CO2 has followed warming rather than leading it in the past, it is a meaningless argument. Plus it isn't very good logic to assume that because one thing happened in the past, a different thing can't happen in the present under a different set of circumstances, like having 6 billion people on the planet and modern industrialization. At least 20% of the problem is caused by deforestation.
By my calculation, reversing the 65 million year process in 200 years means we are putting the carbon back into the short term cycle 325,000 times faster than it was removed from the short term cycle by mother nature. How is that a natural cycle?
Oh it's quite rigorous.
Oh it's quite rigorous. Exceptionally rigorous at preventing dissenting opinions from being heard and blackballing peer review journals who publish reports disagreeing with them.
Re: Oh it's quite rigorous
You need to understand that science has standards. It's wrong to accept poorly researched and poorly supported studies, whatever their conclusions may indicate. Every line of work has standards below which some things become unacceptable. That's the point of peer review -- to avoid errors and exaggerations. The comment refers to "dissenting opinions," and that is exactly what is getting so much attention right now -- opinions. But science is about not opinion.
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