Climate report politicised, says academic Robert Stavins

POLITICS trumped scientific integrity in preparing the final summary documents for the IPCC’s latest reports, according to leading scientists.

POLITICS trumped scientific integrity in preparing the final summary documents for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest reports on climate science, adaptation and mitigation, according to leading scientists.

Robert Stavins, an expert on climate negotiations at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, has published a highly critical review of how governments sanitised the final report in which he was involved.

“The process the IPCC followed resulted in a process that built political credibility by sacrificing scientific integrity,’’ Professor Stavins said.

He said governments had insisted on “detailed changes to test on purely political, as opposed to scientific bases’’.

Some of the changes appear to have been made to safeguard the desire to secure a new global agreement to limit CO2 emissions, which is due to be finalised in Paris in 2015. “Government representatives worked to suppress tests that might jeopardise their negotiating stances in international negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,” Prof Stavins said.

Criticism of the shortcomings of the Kyoto Protocol’s “limited effect on global emissions” was deleted from the summary for policymakers.

Professor Stavins said the only way the government representatives would approve text was to remove all “controversial” text, which meant deleting almost 75 per cent of the text.

Professor Stavins’ comments follow criticisms by Sussex University’s Richard Tol, who quit the IPCC process over what he said were political distortions.

According to Professor Tol, a key message in earlier IPCC drafts was that “many of the more worrying aspects of climate change really are symptoms of mismanagement and underdevelopment”.

“This message does not support the political agenda for greenhouse gas emission reduction,’’ Professor Tol wrote.

“Later drafts put more and more emphasis on the reasons for concern about climate change.”

He said IPCC had failed to guard itself against “selection bias and group think”.