Andy Revkin seems to be excitedly pointing to a Leak of IPCC Drafts.
Frankly, I'm surprised it took so long. And since the review period is over and the next round of revision is probably already underway, it doesn't seem particularly useful or important. For that matter, the drafts were freely available to anyone who wanted to sign up to review them anyway. Revkin think this leak means some "new process" is needed, but I don't see any real arguments presented.
FWIW, I thought the second order draft (at least, the bits I looked at) was mostly pretty reasonable, certainly improved a lot on the first draft. One thing I do find a bit unsatisfactory and unecessarily obstructive about the process is that there is no way of seeing replies to the first set of review comments, so the system is rather crippled compared to a normal peer-review process where reviewers and authors can have a proper exchange of views. This has a real impact when comments appear to be ignored - the reviewer has no way of knowing if the authors' counter-argument is strong, weak, or whether the lack of action was simply an accident. The latter happened this time, in fact, but it took a private email to a relevant IPCC author to find that out. They assured me that the small oversight would be fixed for the final version.
9 comments:
Well, thee and E certainly agree on all that. One huge advantage of the publication of the draft is as a current reference. The big (IEHO) problem with the IPCC process is how ponderous it is, and having the basic information (yes there will be tweaks but not huge changes) almost a year ahead of the final is useful
I've had the same feeling about response to comments. I commented on the lack of any discussion in the FOD of projected changes in environments associated with severe thunderstorms despite the publication of several papers, with broadly similar conclusions, since AR4. For the SOD, I just copied my comments on the FOD and indicated they hadn't been responded to. In my case, I couldn't figure out who would have written the severe thunderstorm section, given the author list.
and discussions on Climate Sensitivity start. so just to annoy the vicegerent of this blog: "Why doesn't AR5 SOD's climate sensitivity reflect new aerosol estimates?" by Nic Lewis at bishop-hill http://t.co/F43INnsB
I think a lot of what Nic Lewis says seems reasonable, though I also suspect that some of his choices will have served to underestimate sensitivity somewhat. Don't forget, "the ipcc" does no research to estimate sensitivity, they only summarise the literature which generally lags the latest evidence.
James, I expect your comment will be contextualized as something approaching a full endorsement of NL's stuff.
OTOH it seems to be disappearing down the memory hole fairly quickly, having fallen just a tad short of the claims made for it pre-"publication."
Done
Woohoo, fame at last. I presume my cheque is in the post.
I'll do a (slightly) more detailed post shortly.
Joe Romm's Schlesinger quote is striking. It's as alarmist as me on a bad day.
Nic Lewis's 5-95% CI for S is 1-3 deg C. In other words, according to NL, S is very likely < 3C, whereas IPCC still has "about 3C".
I suppose the question is how much the IPCC estimate (which is uncganged from AR4 apparently) is at odds with recent evidence.
Also, perhaps the unchanged IPCC estimate is driven largely by CMIP5 (which is "recent" in a sense, I suppose, although perhaps based on earlier forcing assumptions).
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