IAC comments on IPCC process

A excellent reminder on science. A few excerpts from prePublication copy of the InterAcademy Council review of the IPCC process: http://reviewipcc.interacademycouncil.net/report/Executive%20Summary%20and%20Front%20Matter.pdf
1. "Scientific debates have always involved controversies over the value and importance of particular classes of evidence, and this can be expected to continue. Moreover, all scientific knowledge always contains some level of uncertainty and any actions based on scientific evidence inevitably involves an assessment of risk and a process of risk management."
2. IPCC - "overall management and governance structure has not been
modified, and in my view this has made it less agile and responsive than it needs to be."
3. "Moreover, thoughtful controversy will remain a critical ingredient in stimulating
further developments on the scientific frontier relating to our understanding of evolving climate conditions, their impact and the possible responses of policy makers. Indeed climate science is a collective learning process as data are accumulated, interpreted, and used to construct models, and as alternative hypotheses are tested until we have increased confidence in our measurements and models and as a subset of ideas survive careful testing and competing explanations are eliminated. I hope that the progress of climate science in all of these dimensions may slowly remove some of the uncertainties that continue to impede our fuller understanding of global climate change."
4. "The Committee’s main recommendations relate to governance and management, the review process, characterizing and communicating uncertainty, communications, and transparency in the assessment process."
5. Comments "Recommendation: The IPCC should encourage Review Editors to fully exercise their authority to ensure that reviewers’ comments are adequately considered by the authors and that genuine controversies are adequately reflected in the report."
6. Errors - "The Working Group II Summary for Policy Makers has been criticized for various errors and for emphasizing the negative impacts of climate change. These problems derive partly from a failure to adhere to IPCC’s uncertainty guidance for the fourth assessment and partly from shortcomings in the guidance itself."
7. Confidence - "However, authors reported high confidence in some statements for which there is little evidence. Furthermore, by making vague statements that were difficult to refute, authors were able to attach “high confidence” to the statements."
8. "The Working Group II Summary for Policy Makers contains many such statements
that are not supported sufficiently in the literature,"
9. Advocacy - "IPCC leaders have been criticized for making public statements that were perceived as advocating specific climate policies. Straying into advocacy can only hurt IPCC’s credibility."
10. "the absence of criteria for selecting key participants in the assessment process and the lack of documentation for selecting what scientific and technical information is assessed."
11. "The Committee also recommends that Lead Authors document that they have considered the full range of thoughtful views, even if these views do not appear in the assessment report."