Bush Admin Sabotaging Global Warming Report?

The other day, the US Climate Change Science Program, an umbrella organization created by President Bush to coordinate US climate science research, took it upon themselves to publish the current draft of the IPCC Working Group 1 section of the pending "Fourth Assessment Review".  Access to the draft is on a password protected web page, but they are supplying that password via automated email reply to anyone who requests it.  They did this against the express wishes of the IPCC.

So what's the big deal, you wonder?  Sounds like freedom of information, a good thing, right?  Not so fast ... follow below the fold to see why this is not so innocent, and is likely an attempt to sabotage the process.

What is the IPCC

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an international organization established by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) for the purpose of providing policymakers worldwide with the best understanding of the scope and impact of human influence on climate.

IPCC is divided into three working groups.  Working Group 1 looks at the science of climate change, WG2 at the impact and vulnerabilities, WG3 at mitigation strategies.

Approximately every five years, the IPCC issues an "assessment review" which lays out in considerable detail the scientific understanding of these issues.  The last one issued was the IPCC TAR which was published in 2001.  The "Fourth Assessment Review" is due out sometime late this year or early next year (the reason for uncertainty will become apparent below).

The Assessment Review Process

Within each working group are subgroups consisting of a lead author and some number of  
secondary authors.  They are each assigned one chapter within their area of expertise.  
The subgroup reviews all currently relevant research within their chapter's subject matter and compose their best attempt at a balanced and complete presentation of the state of the science.  At that point, the process enters an iterative phase of review and commentary by other experts in the field and corresponding revision and/or clarification.  The authors are required to read, consider and respond to all comments.  All this work is done on a volunteer basis on top of their regular jobs as climate science researchers.

A little history might be appropriate at this point:

After the release of the Second Assessment Review in 1995, there was a series of viscious and baseless attacks on Dr. Ben Santer, lead author of Chapter 8, claiming that he had altered the content of the chapter without approval for political reasons.  This attack was documented by a highly selective comparison of the final report with a leaked version of an earlier draft and fueled by a possibly deliberate misunderstanding of the IPCC process (which Dr. Santer had followed to the letter).

And here we get to the point of this diary.  Arriving at a scientific consensus on any such large and continuously developing scientific endeavor is a monumental task.  Openness to contrary ideas is obviously an important part of that process and a fair reading of the previous assessment reports clearly shows the genuine effort to make clear not only the signs affirming anthropogenic global warming, but also the remaining areas of uncertainty.

But the USCCSP has taken an action which threatens to turn that monumental task into a hopeless one.  Not only did they publish the current draft for anyone to download, offering boundless opportunity for more attacks like the one on Dr. Santer, but they opened the commentary policy up to absolutely anyone as well.

Dr. Stephan Rahmsdorf describes the chaos threatened by this action:

[F]or the last draft of the one IPCC report chapter I am involved in, we had 1700 review comments from the invited expert reviewers. For every single one we have to document what we did with it, and why. Remember we do this work voluntarily, no pay, in addition to our normal full-time jobs, spending weekends and nights away from the family for this. If this review process is flooded by comments from all kinds of non-scientific interest groups ("stakeholders"), this seems to me a clever way of bringing the process to its knees and making it unworkable.

There is no way this problem was not understood by those who decided to publish this draft to the world, which leads me almost inescapably to the conclusion that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage the IPCC process.