More IPCC Mischief

Report cites research accepted for publication 29 months after deadline

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sensibly bases its report on research published prior to a deadline. This may seem like a trivial matter, but it is not. If IPCC authors are to accurately describe the scientific literature, an agreed-upon cutoff date is required. If expert reviewers are to comment on the IPCC's use of that literature, they must be afforded adequate opportunity to examine it.

Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC's embattled chairman, insists his organization scrupulously followed the rules when it produced the 2007 report on which governments now rely to make multi-billion-dollar decisions. A month ago, he assured us that this document:

...was based on scientific studies completed before January 2006, and did not include later studies...

If this is true how could a paper that wasn't accepted for publication until 29 months later be cited multiple times?

The paper in question is titled "West Antarctic ice sheet collapse - the fall and rise of a paradigm." It was authored by David G. Vaughan, a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey. As the abstract makes clear the study was submitted to the journal Climatic Change in November 2005.

The date on a PDF found here tells us a revised version was prepared in January 2006. Although it's unclear what occurred during the next 29 months, the abstract says this paper wasn't accepted for publication until May 2008. (The Working Group 1 installment of the IPCC report was itself finalized in February 2007, leaving a 15-month gap between the IPCC report's published summary and the Vaughan paper's acceptance. There is a 20-month gap between the apparent full publication of the Working Group 1 report in March 2007 and the paper's appearance in print in November 2008.)

The paper is listed in the references for Chapter 10 of the IPCC's Working Group 1 report here where it looks like this:

Vaughan, D.G., 2007: West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse – the fall and rise of a paradigm. Clim. Change, in press.

It is cited (incorrectly, given its eventual 2008 publication date) as Vaughan, 2007 on this page to support a statement whose plausibility it actually rejects. The IPCC declares:

If the Amundsen Sea sector were eventually deglaciated, it would add about 1.5 m to sea level, while the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) would account for about 5 m (Vaughan, 2007). [bold added]

But concluding remarks on page 13 of the January 2006 version of Vaughan's paper leave a different impession:

Since most of WAIS is not showing change, it now seems unlikely that complete collapse of WAIS, with the threat of a 5-m rise in sea level, is imminent in the coming few centuries. [bold added]

If the sole research paper the IPCC cites to establish the notion of a 5-meter sea level rise says such an event is "unlikely" shouldn't the IPCC mention this fact? Yet when the Vaughan paper gets cited on this page, the IPCC once again fails to tell the whole story. Instead, alarming statements go unqualified:

A collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) has been discussed as a potential response to global warming for many years (Bindschadler, 1998; Oppenheimer, 1998; Vaughan, 2007). A complete collapse would cause a global sea level rise of about 5 m. [bold added]

But wait, there's more. The Vaughan study is also cited on this page - bringing to three the number of times the IPCC's Working Group 1 report relies on a paper whose publication status has yet to be determined. The IPCC's Working Group 2 also gets in on the act. It cites the Vaughan paper once on this page of Chapter 15 and three times on this page of Chapter 19.

So why was this paper even under consideration by the IPCC? What does this paper say that's so important, so unique, so dramatic or authoritative that the IPCC felt it couldn't rely on already-published research to make the same case? Beats me.

It would be immensely helpful if Pachauri could enlighten us. At the same time perhaps he could assure us that the following facts have nothing at all to do with this matter. We wouldn't want anyone to erroneously conclude that there are two citation standards: one for IPCC insiders and another for everyone else:

• Working Group 1, Chapter 4 lists a D. Vaughan (UK) as a contributing author
• WG1, Chapter 10 lists a D. Vaughan (UK) as a contributing author
• WG2, Chapter 15 lists a David G. Vaughan (UK) as one of two coordinating lead authors
• WG2's Summary for Policymakers lists a David Vaughan as a drafting author
• WG2's Technical Summary lists a David Vaughan (UK) as a lead author
  

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This post was reworded slightly within the first few hours and several numbers were corrected. My apologies to anyone who cited an earlier version.

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>> IPCC cites an unpublished journal 39 times
>> Cutoff dates, what cutoff dates?
>> The Stern Review scandal - IPCC breaks 3 of its own rules
>> What the IPCC learned from press releases

IPCC Cites an Unpublished Journal 39 Times

We read a lot of magazines in our house. Occasionally, an issue arrives in which nearly every article is engaging and (in the case of cooking magazines) every recipe sounds amazing. In short, the issue is a keeper.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had an experience like that. It was so impressed by one edition of the academic journal Climatic Change that it cited 16 of the 21 papers published that month. The journal editors should take a bow. When three-quarters of a single issue of your publication is relied on by a Nobel-winning report, you're doing something right.

Except for one small problem. The issue in question - May 2007 - didn't exist yet when the IPCC wrote its report. Moreover, none of the research papers eventually published in that issue had been finalized prior to the IPCC's cutoff date.

As the IPCC chairman recently reminded us, that organization's 2007 report:

...was based on scientific studies completed before January 2006, and did not include later studies...

That's what the rules say. And that's what was supposed to have happened. But according to the online abstracts for each of the 16 papers cited by the IPCC and published in the May 2007 issue of Climatic Change (see my working notes here):

• 15 of them weren't accepted by the journal until Oct. 17, 2006
• the other wasn't accepted until May 18, 2006

The first date is highly significant. As the second box on this page makes clear, the IPCC expert review period ended on June 2, 2006 for Working Group 1 and on July 21, 2006 for Working Group 2. This means the expert reviewers had offered their comments on the second draft and had already exited the stage. It means the IPCC had reached the utmost end of a process that represented years of collective labour.

So how could 16 papers, accounting for 39 new citations across fours chapters and two working groups, have made it into this twice vetted, next-to-finalized IPCC report? Those citations don't reference research papers the wider scientific community had already digested. They don't even reference papers that were hot off the press. Instead, in 15 of 16 cases, no expert reviewer could possibly have evaluated these papers since they hadn't yet been accepted for publication by the journal itself.

Where do these 39 citations of the May 2007 issue of Climatic Change turn up in the IPCC report? [working notes here]

• Chapt. 11 by Working Group 1 references ten papers (20 citations in total)
• Chapt. 12 by Working Group 2 references nine papers (15 citations in total)
• Chapt. 2 by Working Group 2 references two papers (2 citations in total)
• Chapt. 3 by Working Group 2 references two papers (2 citations in total)

Among the 10 papers cited in Chapter 11 three were co-authored by Jens Hesselbjerg Christensen. I'm sure it's sheer coincidence that this gentleman served as one of two coordinating lead authors for that chapter.

• see the first abstract here (cited twice as Jacob et al. 2007 on this page of the IPCC report)
• second abstract is here (cited as Déqué et al. 2007 on this page)
• third abstract is here (cited as Christensen et al. 2007 on this page)

I'm equally certain there's no connection whatsoever between the fact that Jørgen E. Olesen was a lead author for the IPCC's Chapter 12 and that a paper he co-authored in the May 2007 issue of Climatic Change got cited four times in that chapter. (That abstract is here. Cited as Olesen et al., 2007 four times on this page.)

Welcome to the strange world of the IPCC. Whenever one turns over a new rock there's something shady beneath.

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Coming soon: the research paper that wasn't accepted for publication until May 2008, yet got cited seven times in the IPCC's 2007 report


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>> Cutoff dates, what cutoff dates?
>> What the IPCC learned from press releases
>> The Stern Review scandal - IPCC breaks 3 of its own rules
>> Climate bible gets 21 'F's on report card