People Or Profit? Science Or Politics?

After four years of work, it took the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change until 5 a.m. on the morning of publication last Friday to agree on the final wording of its new report. Agreement was only reached at the end of an all-night closed session at which delegates from governments cross-questioned the scientists and at times sought to put their own spin on the findings. It is not called an “intergovernmental panel” for nothing, and every last nation had to agree to the text before it was published.

So is this science or politics?

Leaving aside the hysterical fringes, most mainstream media coverage of the IPCC report took one of two lines. Some concentrated on its "stark warning" about how scientists are "more sure than ever" about climate change and humanity’s role in it. Others more skeptically stressed that the panel had confirmed for the first time a slowdown in warming in the past 15 years, and that, partly as a result, it had slightly lowered its projections of future warming.

 But there is a third narrative about the IPCC that has received less attention. Some of those involved in the report process believe the natural caution among scientists — coupled perhaps with a wish not to repeat some exaggerations that marred some previous IPCC reports, and the effect of politicians looking over their shoulders — has created a report that is overly conservative, even biased, in its conclusions. Rather than lowering its expectations of warming, these scientists say, perhaps the panel should be raising them.

The vast tome, which will come to over 3,000 pages, was written by more than 250 authors, reviewed by over 1,000 other experts, and cites more than 9,000 pieces of peer-reviewed science. And yet, in places, the scientists had to work hard last week to restrict political interference with the findings.

Hence that 5 a.m. finish last Friday. Yale Environment 360 has established that the meeting of scientists and government delegates called to sign off on the report was virtually done at midnight on Thursday, when they got to a final paragraph about something the IPCC had not mentioned in previous reports, but which the scientists felt was hardly contentious.

Their draft of the summary report said that, since much of the carbon dioxide emitted into the air by human activity stays there for many centuries, the warming it produces is "irreversible on a human timescale" — at least without massive geo-engineering. Therefore, if the world is serious about restricting warming to below two degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, it needed in effect to impose a carbon budget. It had to restrict total man-made emissions forever to below about one trillion tons of carbon — or to 800 billion tons if we assume that our emissions of other greenhouse gases are unlikely to halt anytime soon. We are already two-thirds of the way there, at around 530 billion tons.

That was the bald scientific calculation. But three governments in particular objected to this statement. According to sources who attended the meeting, they were China, Brazil and Saudi Arabia. 

The scientists dug in. "I sat for five hours defending this paragraph," said Reto Knutti of ETH Zurich, a Swiss science university, who was the coordinating lead author for the relevant chapter on "projections, commitments, and irreversibility."

"There was very strong opposition from many governments. It was obviously political, though they were using strange scientific arguments," Knutti said. The governments saw this statement as, in effect, scientists imposing emissions restrictions through the back door. "I am proud to say we didn’t lose any figures," he added, "though some of the text was rewritten a bit."

Cherry-picked from Fred Pearce's excellent article here

The question was, "So, is this science or politics?" The next question could be, "Capitalist politics or socialist politics?" How much involvement in policy making in capitalist politics is the global population allowed to be and do the governments implement policies that represent the overall views of their constituents? If the answers are "little or none" and "no" then capitalist politics and the capitalist system with their insatiable drive for profit at all costs need to be replaced by a system which is geared to putting people and planet first, ie SOCIALISM.
JS