Interesting news at Bishop Hill. A UK minister informed David Holland’s MP that the extra secrecy measures at IPCC, arising from the instigation of Phil Jones and persistence of Thomas Stocker, arose unintentionally and as a “drafting error”.
The Inter Academy Council had strongly endorsed transparency at IPCC:
it is essential that the processes and procedures used to produce assessment reports be as transparent as possible.
Transparency is an important principle for promoting trust by the public, the scientific community, and governments. Interviews and responses to the Committee’s questionnaire revealed a lack of transparency in several stages of the IPCC assessment process, including scoping and the selection of authors and reviewers, as well as in the selection of scientific and technical information considered in the chapters.
This had been strongly opposed by Phil Jones, (see CA post here which reviews Jones’ correspondence with Stocker.) Stocker led a bureaucratic counter-offensive urging more confidentiality:
Confidentiality is part of the basic way in which IPCC goes about its work..
Stocker’s bureaucratic intrigues (see CA post here and David Holland here) led to the adoption of language at the May 2011 IPCC meeting that increased confidentiality (see contemporary Bishop Hill post here).
As a result of David Holland’s further initiatives, the UK Minister of State for Energy and Climate Change wrote to his MP as follows:
We are aware that this new text would mean that reviewers would not have the opportunity to see how their comments had been addressed by IPCC authors before acceptance of the final report. It was not the IPCC’s intention to change the procedures in this way and it is likely a drafting error. Indeed, the intention of the update in the procedures was to increase openness in the way that IPCC reports are prepared. We understand that the IPCC is aware of this issue and intends to address it at the next appropriate opportunity.
The IPCC meets in early June.
I’m betting on Sir Humphrey.
Climate Audit 
16 Comments
Jones and Stocker, too clever by half did
Lots of work in how changes were crafted
But one error we see
Fairly transparently
Is in who was permitted to draft it
There is so much “transparent” retracted
They won’t give up and show what the facts did!
How they reach their results
(As with L-ronner cults)
Is a process quite fiercely redacted
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
“We understand that the IPCC is aware of this issue and intends to address it at the next appropriate opportunity”
Any bets on the timescale?
I’m looking at a decadel scale.
Yes Minister, we are aware of the problem but with such limited resources we will clearly need more funding to set up a proper Committee to deal with the issue more appropriately.
According to this document
Click to access doc11_correctionApendixA.pdf
the wording
“All written expert, and government review comments will be made available to reviewers on request during the review process”
had been incorrectly deleted from the procedures and is to be reinstated.
Maybe they deleted it due to that erroneous comma after “expert”.
The documents for the June IPCC meeting are here. The proposal in Doc11 merely puts back the Stocker-Jones deletion:
This does not implement what the UK government’s stated view is:
Lets see if the Minister sticks to his statement and insists on a proper review process.
Am I the only one who sees the Minister’s response as dancing carefully and quietly around the difference between reducing access for IPCC authors and reducing access for the public?
Has the Minister tried to answer an expression of concern about access for the public with a statement of enthusiasm for access for IPCC authors only?
Restoring the former status quo does not sufficiently empower reviewers. Reviewers should be entitled to see the file of Review COmments and Responses from the point at which they become available. The IPCC TSU interprets “review period” very narrowly to only be the period when drafts are out for comment. In practice, this means that interested reviewers can see the First Draft review comments (without responses) during the 6 weeks of the Second Draft review. And never see Second Draft review comments (or responses) until public availability.
No, Minister.
A drafting error is when someone transcribes a document and, for example, inadvertently leaves the word “not” out a sentence such as this: “The IPCC will not tolerate compromises in its policy of openness and transparency.”
Or:
A drafting error is when someone transcribes a document and, for example, inadvertently INSERTS the word “not” into a sentence such as this: “The IPCC will not tolerate compromises in its policy of openness and transparency.”
Hmmm … well, according to http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session35/doc11_correctionApendixA.pdf there is the following proposed amendment to Appendix A on the table:
The rest of us peons will, of course, not be privy to this material until after publication. What is not indicated is:
a) Whether or not the material to be made available includes the “chapter team’s” responses
b) Whether or not such disclosure will require that the requestor agree not to quote, cite, distribute, etc before receiving such material.
Perhaps between now and June 6, Stocker the stick-handler will succeed in engineering a further delaying tactic in order to advance the need for “confidentiality” about which he and Jones were so concerned [she says somewhat skeptically].
Not to mention that the IPCC does not have a particularly good record when it comes to following its own procedures.
Has someone kept a chronicle of the attempts to subvert transparency in IPCC while proclaiming adherence to same? IIRC, first there was Santer’s last-minute tinkering with the Summary for Policymakers. Then Caspar and the Jesus Paper. Then the exclusion of Steve and Ross’s report on UHI. Now Stocker (see CG2 emails quoted by Steve in last Stocker post, between him and Jones) tries to formally (or otherwise) amend the IPCC rules to keep out transparency again, in ways strongly reminiscent of the familiar “hide the decline”.
From Simon Anthony at Bishop Hill
This feels like an iron fist in a velvet glove.
Stocker already teamed up in 2003 with Rahmstorf in a bizarre “critique” of the cosmic ray/climate link.
http://www.sciencebits.com/ClimateDebate/
“The assault by Rahmstorf et al. (in EOS Forum)”.
The political motivation of this group is revealed in the climategate emails:
http://di2.nu/foia/foia2011/mail/1981.txt
What is amazing in that Rahmstorf email, is this notion that what scientists paid by government do is “science”, whereas those paid by anyone else is “lobbying”.
I think it is a big mistake to go along with ‘secrecy’ being spun into ‘confidentialty’.
If ever “nomen est omen” was valid, this is it. If my name were Sticker, I would be an alarmist, too.
But let us remember the guy from the same University of Bern who resigned after the CERN-neutrino fiasco. A real scientist.
And the actual hockey-stickers of Bern, who placed a very good second in the Swiss championship (this is a bit of a joke on the good people of Bern who are probably still crying about that last second decider).
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