April 2010
Impact Climate Change The legitimacy of the IPCC by Stéphane Hallegatte and Richard Klein, Members of the Climate Change Scientific Committee of Natixis AM
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an international body set up in 1988. It has 194 member countries and operates under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme. It is managed by a Bureau(1) gathering 31 members elected by the member countries.
n What is the role of the IPCC? The IPCC’s mandate is to provide regular reports to policymakers in all countries about the current state of scientific progress on climate change, risks related to climate change and possible strategies for dealing with them. The mandate also makes it clear that the prime purpose of the reports is to inform public policymaking, not to make any political recommendations. The IPCC therefore never comments on whether climate policies should be introduced or what form they should take. The IPCC must only act as a source of information for the process of public policy making, it cannot replace it. So, for instance, when you read expressions like an “IPCC recommendation”, which crop up frequently in the media, this is nonsense. IPCC reports never contain any recommendations, nor do they take any policy positions.
n IPCC reports: the priority is to inform The IPCC has published 4 major reports since 1991. They summarise, synthesise and evaluate the advances in our knowledge about climate change, the impacts it will have and the policy options for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
The Climate Change Scientific Committee of Natixis Asset Management So as to better understand the challenges of climate change and proposed solutions, Natixis Asset Management has created its own Climate Change Scientific Committee, bringing together recognized experts. Headed by Carlos Joly, cochair of the Expert Group that drafted the United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Investment, this committee meets twice a year. Natixis Asset Management’s Climate Change Scientific Committee has three main objectives: 1. To enlighten the Natixis Asset Management's teams and portfolio managers on climate change and its consequences 2. To advise on the appropriateness of the securities in which the portfolio is invested 3.To provide information
(1) The IPCC Bureau is made up of scientists elected by the Plenary of the IPCC to represent different disciplines and world regions. It has 31 members including a Chairman, 3 vice-Chairs, the bureaux of each of the 3 working groups and the 2 co-Chairs of the special task force. Of the 3 working groups, Group I looks at the scientific basis for the climatic system and climate change. Working Group II investigates issues about the vulnerability of social, economic and natural systems to climate change, the positive and negative impacts of such change and the possibilities for adaptation. Working Group III examines potential solutions that would limit greenhouse gas emissions or otherwise mitigate climate change. The task force on national greenhouse gas inventories is responsible for implementing the IPCC programme for compiling national greenhouse inventories. The current IPCC Bureau was elected in 2008 and the next election is due after delivery of the fifth assessment report in 2014. (Sources: website of the French Ministry of ’Ecology, Energy, Sustainable Development and the Sea, with responsibility for green technologies and climate negotiations, and the website of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, www.ipcc.ch).
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Impact Climate Change / The legitimacy of the IPCC / April 2010
The drafting process Stage 1: defining the outline Scientists selected by the Bureau meet to draw up an “outline” for each report, which is then approved by all IPCC member states in a plenary meeting. Stage 2: selecting the authors The authors for each chapter of the report are then selected by the Bureau based on proposals from member countries and on criteria related to scientific background and representativeness. Stage 3: “internal” scrutiny and “external” review The authors prepare a first-order draft of the different chapters, which are then commented on by the other scientists selected. A second-order version of the texts is then written taking account of comments made. This in turn is reviewed by any scientist who wishes to see it and by the governments of the IPCC member states who call on their own experts for this purpose.
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Stage 4: public discussion of the texts The authors must deal with all remarks, either correcting the original text or explaining why they have disregarded the comments. These exchanges are published to make the process as transparent as possible. Despite these successive reviews, some errors can nonetheless creep into the thousands of pages that make up the report, particularly if they do not affect the main conclusions.
Formalising a scientific consensus IPCC reports must establish a “scientific consensus”: unanimous or near-unanimous agreement on what we know and what we do not know. For this reason, reports also explain the controversies and uncertainties that remain, rather than passing over them in silence. Issues about the effects of clouds, for instance, are clearly set out in the third and fourth reports. On this point, it is worth mentioning that some authors who have attacked the IPCC are also frequently cited (e.g. Richard Lindzen(2)). Of course, the lead authors for a chapter have an influence on the content of the report, but their room for manoeuvre is constrained as there will always be another author, scientist or governmental expert ready to point out any oversights or omissions during the drafting or consultation phase for each contribution
Summary for policymakers Each report is then boiled down into a “summary for policymakers” which is put through a still more rigorous review. It is discussed, amended and approved line by line at a meeting of the delegations of all member countries.
In some cases, it has taken hours of discussion to reach agreement on a single word. In the 2007 report, for instance, several hours of debate were needed to decide whether the report would say it was “likely” or “very likely” that climate change impacts were already observable. In the end, like all reports, this one was only published after the whole text had been accepted unanimously by the IPCC’s 194 countries, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the USA under the George W Bush administration. Quite clearly, no “alarmist” position would make it through this ultra-rigorous screening process.
n The IPCC at the heart of the debate Accusations of manipulation Given these procedures, the idea that the IPCC is seeking to manipulate public opinion seems completely fanciful. This would require the “complicity” of all 194 governments of the IPCC’s member states, including the OPEC(3) countries. In contrast, it seems clear that the IPCC is a unique space for discussion among scientists and governments, which makes often complex scientific data accessible, through procedures of great rigour and transparency.
Breaking away from false controversy The attacks currently being levelled at the IPCC mainly come from groups that want to sidestep the scientific debate with its rigorous rules and, instead, make their case through the mass media, where it is easier to get away with approximations, simplifications and errors, and where there is no scope for going into the detail essential for a well-founded argument. In reality, the IPCC massively simplifies the negotiations on climate change policy being conducted under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The IPCC first establishes a consensus on our scientific knowledge about the climate, which is explicitly accepted by all countries. The negotiators in the UNFCCC then have a common basis to start discussing what action to take. Separating out the two issues – what we know from what we should do – makes discussions easier. The lack of any such mechanism is often cited as a reason for failed negotiations on other environmental issues, like desertification or biodiversity. Negotiators spend their time disputing the scientific basis for a problem rather than going to the heart of the matter and discussing what measures would improve the situation.
(2) Richard Lindzen, climatologist and Alfred P. Sloan Professor at the MIT. (3) OPEC: Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
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Impact Climate Change / The legitimacy of the IPCC / April 2010
n IPCC reports: a sound scientific base on climate change Today, the IPCC can still claim to be the most credible source of scientific information on climate change. Its main conclusions therefore remain valid: • Climate change is unequivocal, and meteorological data show a steady rise in temperature of 0.7°C in the 20th century. • The cause of the change is very likely human activity. The authors of the IPCC rate the probability of humans being the cause at 90%. The increase in greenhouse gases can explain the changes seen and, particularly, the geographical structure of these changes. None of the alternative theories put forward (such as that which stresses the role of the sun) can explain these changes.
waves. In some other cases, though, major uncertainties remain. Sometimes we cannot even tell whether the change will be positive or negative (e.g. in the case of the Indian and African monsoon). • These changes will have consequences for ecosystems and economies and will require major transformations, particularly of infrastructure. Putting a figure on the economic cost of these changes is beyond current capabilities. • Economic models suggest that current technologies will be sufficient to reduce greenhouse gases, but that this will require deliberate policies. • To stabilise CO2 equivalents in the atmosphere at around 450 ppm(4), a level that would offer around a 50% chance that global warming could be kept below 2°C, requires that the world starts to reduce global emissions around 2015, a target that looks hard to achieve at the moment.
• Unless additional climate policies are put in place, the climate models project a rise in temperature of between 1°C and 6°C by 2100. Half of the uncertainty in this forecast derives from uncertainty about future greenhouse gas emissions and the other half from uncertainty about how the climate will respond to these emissions.
• The cost of stabilising atmospheric CO2 equivalents at 550 ppm would be several percentage points of global GDP and would not imperil global growth. But these estimates remain controversial and must be treated with caution.
• Some extreme events will become more frequent and more intense, including global-scale heat waves and coastal flooding due to rising sea levels. In different regions, we may also see a rise in other types of event: drought in some (e.g. the Mediterranean and western USA), floods in others (e.g. on the equator). Other events will, however, become rarer, such as cold-
Written on April 6, 2010 by Stéphane Hallegatte, specialist in the socioeconomic impacts of climate change and Richard Klein, specialist in adaptation to climate change, both members of Natixis Asset Management’s Climate Change Scientific Committee
(4) ppm (parts per million): number of CO2 molecules per million molecules of dry air.
The authors Stéphane Hallegatte, researcher in environmental economics and climate science at the Ecole Nationale de la Météorologie, Météo-france and CIRED (International Centre for Research on the Environment and Development). He was also involved in the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in 2007.
Richard Klein, researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute where he coordinates research on climate change policies across 7 research centres. He has specialised for over 15 years in methodological aspects of climatic risk, evaluation of vulnerability and climate adaptation processes in society. Today, he is focusing on the integration of climate issues in development policy.
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