AG #4

Como não tenho muito tempo livre, remeto-me a apontar alguns textos chave, após a publicação do relatório do InterAcademy of Sciences sobre os feitos e desfeitos do IPCC.

Dou a palavra a William Briggs:

Now, whether the IAC is sufficiently qualified to dress down the IPCC down is debatable. But dress them down they have. In a brutal report, the IAC found that the IPCC leadership was “less agile and responsive than it needs to be” in answering it many criticisms.

Este parágrafo do relatório é interessante:

[The IPCC should] give greater attention to assessing uncertainties and confidence in [key findings]. Avoid trivializing statements just to increase their confidence…Determine the areas in your chapter where a range of views may need to be described…to form a collective view on uncertainty or confidence.

William continua:

For examples of “Structural uncertainty”, they say, “Inadequate models, incomplete or competing conceptual frameworks, lack of agreement on model structure, ambiguous system boundaries or definitions, significant processes or relationships wrongly specified or not considered.”

Finally, “Value uncertainty: Missing, inaccurate or non-representative data, inappropriate spatial or temporal resolution, poorly known or changing model parameters.”

The IAC had to tell the IPCC that their pronouncements should not be spoken in the same tone Moses used when descending Sinai; they reminded the IPCC that “probabilistic approaches are available” and that they should consider reporting “ranges of outcomes and their associated likelihoods”. To make this complete, there’s a sarcastic lesson on rhetoric: “A 10% chance of dying is interpreted more negatively than a 90% chance of surviving.”

(...)

But the IAC wasn’t finished. The knife was already in and had already cut the vital organs, but they gave it a twist anyway, by stating, “[The IPCC should] be aware of a tendency for a group to converge on an expressed view and become overconfident in it”. About this quip Bertie Wooster would have said, “And they meant it to sting!”

O spin dado pelo status quo é completamente diferente. No Real Climate:

It appears mostly sensible and has a lot of useful things to say about improving IPCC processes – from suggesting a new Executive to be able to speak for IPCC in-between reports, a new communications strategy, better consistency among working groups and ideas for how to reduce the burden on lead authors in responding to rapidly increasing review comments.

(...)

The suggestions made here will mostly strengthen the credibility of the next IPCC, particularly working groups 2 and 3, though whether it will make the conclusions less contentious is unclear.

A ver também o comentário da Nature, com um título mais adequado, "IPCC must adapt to survive".