Tag: IPCC

A modest proposal for the IPCC

Make it shorter. The Fifth Assessment, that is.

There’s a fairly endless list of suggestions for ways to amend IPCC processes, plus an endless debate over mostly-miniscule improprieties and errors buried in the depths of the report, fueled by the climategate emails.

I find the depth of the report useful personally, but I’m an outlier – how much is really needed? Do any policy makers really read 3000 pages of stuff, every 5 years?

Maybe the better part of valor would be to agree on a page limit – perhaps 350 per working group (the size of the 1990 report), and relegate all the more granular material to a wiki-like lit review and live summary, that could evolve more fluidly.

A shorter report would be easier to edit and read, and less likely to devote ink to details that are fundamentally very uncertain.

SRES – We've got a bigger problem now

Recently Pielke, Wigley and Green discussed the implications of autonomous energy efficiency improvements (AEEI) in IPCC scenarios, provoking many replies. Some found the hubbub around the issue surprising, because the assumptions concerned were well known, at least to modelers. I was among the surprised, but sometimes the obvious needs to be restated loud and clear. I believe that there are several bigger elephants in the room that deserve such treatment. AEEI is important, as are other hotly debated SRES choices like PPP vs. MEX, but at the end of the day, these are just parameter choices. In complex systems parameter uncertainty generally plays second fiddle to structural uncertainty. Integrated assessment models (IAMs) as a group frequently employ similar methods, e.g., dynamic general equilibrium, and leave crucial structural assumptions untested. I find it strange that the hottest debates surround biogeophysical models, which are actually much better grounded in physical principles, when socio-economic modeling is so uncertain.

Continue reading “SRES – We've got a bigger problem now”