IPPC dismisses doubts raised by the CRU Hack controversy
Those who were imagining the IPCC was rethinking its views on climate change after Rajendra Pachauri’s statements to the Press about the stolen e-mails didn’t get it quite right.
Sergio Abranches
IPCC’s “Working Group I” that reports on climate science has issued a note condemning the whole affair and standing by findings that a rise in the use of greenhouse gases was a factor on global warming.
The note signed by Professors Thomas Stocker and Qin Dahe, co-chairs of WGI says:
Comments on blogs and in the media about the contents of a large number of private emails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom, have questioned both the validity of the key findings of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) and the integrity of its authors. IPCC WGI condemns the illegal act which led to private emails being posted on the Internet and firmly stands by the findings of the AR4 and by the community of researchers worldwide whose professional standards and careful scientific work over many years have provided the basis for these conclusions.
The note also clears the mistaken view that a single research unit was feeding the UN body all the relevant data on global warming.
The key finding of IPCC AR4, “The warming in the climate system is unequivocal [...] “, is based on measurements made by many independent institutions worldwide that demonstrate significant changes on land, in the atmosphere, the ocean and in the ice-covered areas of the Earth. Through further, independent scientific work involving statistical methods and a range of different climate models, these changes have been detected as significant deviations from natural climate variability and have been attributed to the increase of greenhouse gases.
The two spokespersons for the IPCC support not only the scientific evidence the WGI has relied on to issue their fourth assessment, but also the numerous scientists that have produced the body of work reviewed for the assessment.
The body of evidence is the result of the careful and painstaking work of hundreds of scientists worldwide. The internal consistency from multiple lines of evidence strongly supports the work of the scientific community, including those individuals singled out in these email exchanges, many of whom have dedicated their time and effort to develop these findings in teams of Lead Authors within the production of the series of IPCC Assessment Reports during the past 20 years.
The note concludes explaining the IPCC process of research coverage and reviews ensuring both the widest reach possible regarding all peer-reviewed published work within the period considered, as well as the scientific integrity of the assessment itself.
The IPCC assessment process is designed to ensure consideration of all relevant scientific information from established journals with robust peer review processes, or from other sources which have undergone robust and independent peer review. The entire report writing process of the IPCC is subjected to extensive and repeated review by experts as well as by governments. Consequently, there is full opportunity for experts in the field to draw attention to any piece of published literature and its basic findings that would ensure inclusion of a wide range of views.
As a result, “no individual scientist in the IPCC assessment process is in a position to change the conclusions, or to exclude relevant peer-reviewed papers and scientific work from an IPCC Assessment Report.”
In conclusion, IPCC WGI firmly stands behind its unique procedures and behind the scientific community and their collective work which has been, and continues to be, the basis of unbiased, open and transparent assessments of the current knowledge on the climate system and its changes.
This seems to eliminate any speculation about the quality of the science behind the IPCC work. What continues a subject of interest is who supported the hacking and who actually did it.