Climate change issues: the problem of unwarranted trust

Now you may think that it was naïve if not unreasonable of us to suggest that an official inquiry like the Stern Review should go out of its way to comment on “established official policies and procedures”, rather than taking these as given; and indeed, we might not have raised the issue had it not been for a then recent contribution to the debate which we saw as carrying weight. The contribution in question was the report, itself entitled “The economics of climate change”, from the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs.

The Select Committee report is a wide-ranging document, but for me its most striking feature, and an especially welcome one, was the concerns that it expressed about the IPCC.

Given the credibility which the IPCC has acquired, it is truly remarkable that a group of eminent, experienced and responsible persons, drawn from a national legislative body and spanning the political spectrum, with the help of an internationally recognised expert adviser (the late David Pearce), and after taking and weighing evidence, should have published a considered and unanimous report in which the work and role of the Panel are put in question.

After a long interval, Her Majesty’s Government, through the agency of DEFRA, published a dismissive official response to the Select Committee report, in which the the IPCC and its proceedings were duly commended without reserve. In commenting on this document, I said that it illustrated precisely those features of the IPCC process and milieu which prompted the Select Committee’s concerns.

How (you may ask) has the Stern Review treated the questions thus raised by the Select Committee, and by others too? As you know, the Review is long and wide-ranging, and it is also amply documented. From a rapid survey, it appears to list about 1,100 papers and studies as references. This extensive list does not include the report from the Select Committee. To put it mildly, this is a strange omission.

In taking no account of the possibility that the IPCC process may be open to serious question, the Stern Review has followed the common established practice of many commentators from various subject disciplines.

In economics, some topical examples which have emerged a column by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times, the warm pre-publication endorsements of the Stern Review from eminent economists that are printed together with the main text, and - I have to add - the impressive presentation which we have heard from Dieter Helm (PDF 158KB).

In these and many other cases, the authors take the established official process of inquiry and assessment as given, trustworthy and professionally watertight: hence they accept its “consensus” results. In their analysis, and in the conclusions they draw for policy, there is no trace, hint, vestige or glimmer of awareness that that process could be deeply flawed, in ways that put the results in question.

Policy

From the position that I have now come to hold, I draw one very simple initial conclusion for policy. It is this:

In relation to climate change, an urgent present need is to build up a sounder basis than now exists for reviewing and assessing the issues. A process should be established, for informing and advising governments and public opinion alike, which is more objective, more representative, more rigorous and more balanced than that which the IPCC and its sponsoring departments and agencies have built up and shown themselves unwilling to change.