Today in Nairobi, Kenya, Jim Skea, a Professor of Sustainable Energy at Imperial College in London, was elected from a slate of four candidates to lead the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) through its 7th Assessment cycle, which will take up much of the current decade. If you are not familiar with Skea, I highly recommend this recent interview with Michael Liebreich.
I am optimistic that Skea will be an effective leader of the organization, which has experienced mission creep and a loss of focus in recent years. Skea most recently led the IPCC’s Working Group 3, which despite its numerical ranking is the organization’s most important working group as it is the one closest to policy and sets the foundation for the work of the other two working groups.
Skea announced three top priorities for his tenure:
"I will pursue three priorities – improving inclusiveness and diversity, shielding scientific integrity and policy relevance of IPCC assessment reports, and making the effective use of the best available science on climate change. My actions as the Chair of the IPCC will ensure that these ambitions are realized.”
As readers here well know, I have long supported the mission of the IPCC to provide “regular assessments of the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation.” If the IPCC did not exist, we’d have to invent it. I view the IPCC to be so important that it is worth investing the time and effort to get it right.
The IPCC over its 30+ years of existence has at times deviated from its mission, suffered issues of quality control and groupthink, and succumbed to the siren call of climate advocacy. Its most recent assessment cycle was highly uneven — For instance, its Working Group 1 delivered an overall strong AR6 assessment report and Working Group 2 delivered one that was poor quality. All three working groups suffer from an over-reliance on outdated, implausible scenarios.
The IPCC is under intense pressure to act as another advocacy group pushing for “climate action” (whatever that is taken to mean). If you actually read the IPCC reports you will discover that climate science is not apocalyptic nor does it present climate change as an existential crisis for people or the planet. The gap between media representations of climate and overheated political rhetoric has never been larger. To call things straight will mean some tough love from the IPCC.
Skea has his work cut out for him.
To that end, and in hopes of being blunt but constructive, with respect to Skea’s three priorities, here is some unsolicited advice.
This is an important objective. The IPCC needs to diversify its inclusiveness without sacrificing the quality of its work. In recent years the IPCC has faced criticism for a lack of diversity in gender, indigenous representation, nationality, and inclusion of practitioners. These are all fair criticisms and not even a comprehensive list.
Perhaps the greatest opportunity for rapidly increasing inclusiveness and diversity would be to take seriously the part of its mission that is focused on developing options for mitigation and adaptation. For too long, the IPCC has been subsumed to the Framework Convention on Climate Change and has not truly served as an honest broker of policy options.
For instance, now that we know that the 1.5 degree Celsius target will not be met, the world is in need of an assessment of what options would make sense for global policy to replace that target. Developing options means not championing any one in particularly, but providing policy makers with alternatives for what they could do.
Developing options is best done via the participation of a diverse and inclusive group of people, recognizing that not everyone has to agree on the “best” option. The IPCC has never really lived up to its potential as an honest broker of policy options. If it did so it could readily work with a much more diverse set of participants.
One other area where the IPCC needs to up its game is with respect to equity. Last fall I wrote about an important paper (and since generating much discission) that argued of the scenarios of the IPCC AR6,
“not only do the scenarios not “make explicit assumptions about global equity”, but they in fact project existing global inequities far into the future.”
Climate policy cannot succeed by keeping poor people poor, in absolute or relative terms. The IPCC must consider a wider range of equitable futures.
One additional area where the IPCC needs to improve its diversity is intellectual diversity. The IPCC has become too much a club of the likeminded and not a forum for debate and disagreement. In my areas of expertise I am well aware of outstanding global scholars whose views may challenge those of IPCC insiders and who have not been a part of the IPCC. Including such diversity of views in its work may be uncomfortable to some but ultimately will make the IPCC stronger and viewed as more legitimate and trustworthy.
Shielding Scientific Integrity and Policy Relevance of IPCC Assessment Reports
This is another important objective. The IPCC needs to be shielded from the meddling of various government and corporate interests to be sure — but it also needs to be shielded from pressures from climate activists, including those within the scientific community.
I have recently written about how important elements of the IPCC have been overtaken by a group of political activists promoting the idea of “transformational change” across society.
. . . transformation is the resulting ‘fundamental reorganisation of large-scale socio-economic systems’ (Hölscher et al. 2018). Such a fundamental reorganisation often requires dynamic multi-stage transition processes that change everything from public policies and prevailing technologies to individual lifestyles, and social norms to governance arrangements and institutions of political economy
This may be well and good, but it is not the role of a scientific assessment to be in the business of promoting a narrow vision of future global development. This is mission creep.
Climate change is an issue involving alterations to the Earth’s energy balance via the emission of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, and other alterations to the Earth system such as land use change. The emphasis should be on knowledge in support of mitigation and adaptation options and not exhortation for this or that vision of global transformation.
There are two ways to best shield the IPCC from all political pressures.
One is to play the role of an honest broker of mitigation and adaptation alternatives. For instance, all of the following questions should be asked:
What are the pluses and minuses of a coal-phase out treaty?
Of a commitment to dramatically expanding nuclear power?
Of a rapid deployment of wind and solar?
Of carbon capture and storage/utilization in support of continued fossil fuel use?
And more . . .
Right now the IPCC either does not ask such questions (e.g., nuclear) or builds them into models without much debate (e.g., carbon capture).
Discussing a diversity of options opens the door to considering some options that certain interests are vehemently opposed to, but in diversity is some protection against capture by any one of those interests.
Developing a diversity of options necessitates opening up the institution to a greater range of intellectual views. The IPCC has for many decades been captured by a small community of integrated assessment modelers, located in rich countries. It is not surprising that these models privilege policy preferences and future outcomes of those in these same rich countries.
IPCC leaders often say that their job is to assess the literature and not shape it, but this is of course not true. The IPCC needs to be as cognizant of the importance of policies for science — the decisions that shape the production of science, as it is of the importance of science for policy — the decisions that shape adaptation and mitigation.
A greater engagement at the science-policy interface may also offer a surprising degree of protection against the pressures to politicize the IPCC.
Making Effective Use of the Best Available Science on Climate Change
The absolute top priority that the IPCC must have for its 7th assessment cycle is to clean up the RCP8.5 debacle. I know it is uncomfortable. I know it challenges entrenched interests within the climate research community (particularly academics). I know that it will cause ripple effects in climate politics and advocacy. All of these things are difficult.
But committing the organization to making effective use of the best available science means prioritizing truth over expediency. Skea knows this very well. Here is what he said about RCP8.5 in his interview with Michael Liebreich (and see my Twitter thread on that interview here), and note how Skea acknowledges that there may be space between his views and those while wearing his IPCC “official hat”:
It is time to remove the “official hat” and for the IPCC to align itself with today’s best available science.
The IPCC and by extension the climate research community is not simply in need of updated, more plausible scenarios — it is in need of a fundamentally new approach to the development and use of scenarios, one which is much more consistent with the timescales of adaptation and mitigation decisions in the real world. That will imply big changes for climate modeling intended to support climate policy (and of course, not all climate modeling need serve this role).
For far too long the needs of the climate research community have trumped those of decision makers, while the IPCC has pretended that these needs are one and the same. The energy community is capable of producing updated scenarios of global futures on an annual basis. The climate community is similarly capable. They just need leadership and a commitment to do so.
More generally, the IPCC needs to rely less on contributors who over-cite their own work and gatekeep the work of others. For instance, in my areas of expertise I’ve documented entire literatures ignored or excluded by the IPCC. Once again, a solution lies in opening up the IPCC to greater intellectual diversity and inclusiveness.
Given how far media and advocacy discussions of climate change have departed from the assessments of the IPCC, I have no doubt that there will be extreme pressure placed upon the IPCC to push its messaging in a much more extreme, alarmist direction. Indeed, the IPCC has already started down this path. Calling things straight is sometimes unwelcome, but that is of course why we have organizations like the IPCC.
I wish Jim well in his tenure as Chair of the IPCC. He will need a lot of help and support to make progress towards his three goals. He will also face a lot of countervailing pressures. People like me who have been outside the IPCC process (and there are many) stand ready to help. We are not hard to find.
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I admire your optimism that the IPCC can be fixed.
I hope you are right.
I fear that you are sadly mistaken and they can never escape the interests that have captured them.
I'd prefer to live in the world where you are correct....
"Climate policy cannot succeed by keeping poor people poor..."
Profound and succinct. I'm pretty sure Professor Skea is going to adopt this as his motto.