“the IPCC holds a natural monopoly on science advice for climate change policy. It’s not that there are no alternative views available; it’s that the dominance of the IPCC hinders the competitiveness of these views”
this is very true.
I have directly experienced this. Here is an example which I documented on my weblog
National Research Council, 2005: Radiative forcing of climate change: Expanding the concept and addressing uncertainties. Committee on Radiative Forcing Effects on Climate Change, Climate Research Committee, Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Division on Earth and Life Studies, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 208 pp
Kabat, P., Claussen, M., Dirmeyer, P.A., J.H.C. Gash, L. Bravo de Guenni, M. Meybeck, R.A. Pielke Sr., C.J. Vorosmarty, R.W.A. Hutjes, and S. Lutkemeier, Editors, 2004: Vegetation, water, humans and the climate: A new perspective on an interactive system.Springer, Berlin, Global Change - The IGBP Series, 566 pp
You're on to something important here, but I'd offer a semantic nitpick:
It isn't "knowledge" that the IPCC has a "stranglehold" on. It's credibility among voters and policy makers.
There is plenty of relevant knowledge that the IPCC chooses to mischaracterize or ignore. One only has to consult Clintel's review of the IPCC Summary for Policymakers or the many critiques - often devastating - of the CO2 climate catastrophe story.
The appeal to authority citing the IPCC works far better than it should. The body was set up to investigate anthropogenic global warming damaging to humanity. The mission statement assumes at the outset a result in scientific inquiries that are central to climate policy.
An absurd situation, and yet here we are. Jonathan Swift would have loved it.
If memory serves, the global warming theory was originally concocted to explain why the Earth maintains a warm atmosphere and surface temperature at all. Some analysis claimed that without CO2 in the atmosphere we'd always be freezing to death.
Forgotten was that the 8000 mile diameter earth is MOSTLY INCREDIBLY HOT LAVA with a thin crust and even thinner atmosphere (100 miles approx). Since, apparently, no one knows how to calculate the heat transfer from the lava to the surface, it is omitted from "global warming" calculations!
Maybe if you don't know how to analyze a phenomenon YOU SHOULDN'T propose policy! Let me know if I am way off-base.
The climate science enterprise has some tightly held and radically consequential assumptions
The choice of 2° or 1.5° is the result of politicians asking scientists, "at what point do significant changes begin?" and getting the answer of 2°. Then they ask the scientists what policy path would result in 2° of warming. Then they *don't* ask, "What policies are most effective?"
Neither the target or the policy proposed to reach it is scientific. And this is all referred to as a scientific consensus. According to Bloomberg a 2° policy costs $34 trillion more than what they refer to as the economically optimal policy of about 2.5°. Incredibly their angle on this is that 2050 net zero is justified because that $34 trillion is only 20% more expensive. Even these economists who are aware of alternate paths hew tightly to the political consensus
Another seemingly entirely ignored issue is that higher marginal costs to low income people globally apply to both climate effects and climate policy effects
There's a lot of very scientifically, and politically, legitimate space that the IPCC has left wide open for a worthy competitor
with the expansion of governance globally and in many domains, the non governmental associations of experts & advocates assert more weight in policy and paradigm, and can settle into self-perpetuating 'cartels' or 'complex' anchored around paradigmatic fads, such as the climate sensational-investor risk tea party the Republicans investigated for collusion. societies are challenged to increase state capacity to accelerate distribution of the technology advance coursing through the production and finance sectors, yet how do we keep the public bodies and practitioners on track, or more specifically how do they keep themselves on track? the state capacity needed is much broader than clear policy and coherent regulation, it includes competent bodies to manage/partner in research & commercialization, infrastructure, and local jurisdiction full learning-employment and conservation of ecosystems. State capacity is the basic policy alternative to the protectionist partition of commerce and scientific exchange and associated escalation of secessionist conflict into war that the west is testing now.
the trust busting, NSF research initiatives, and universities rewarding diverse/contrary research suggested in this article are likely useful. restraining or channeling the western drive to censor and deplatform science, social science application, and social media would likely also be helpful to weaken the professional and institutional pressures that sanitize and constrain science too narrow. there are no doubt myriad lessons in the chinese approach of performance incentives for public sector administrators and bodies, and the resultant of enhanced technical ecosystems. the 60s long march through the institutions has come to fruition and it illustrates long term battle within organizations to learn new things and reject old paradigms with trial and error and room for serendipity.
another problem of structure & paradigm is the ethic neutrality position within science and the broader separation of church and state. we removed the catholic control over the euro middle ages great, we have more pressing problems now. neutrality toward ethic questions ('private matter') was probably convenient for the science minded and did little damage when traditional religions shouldered ethic development of families. Now neutrality has logically progressed to victim worship, in the realm of environment the victim is Mother Nature. Public education probably the strongest external foundation for families is prohibited from cultivating ethics among students. At a broad level this is another self serving complex, victimology policies generate ever more clients for the victim brokers to tend - failing students, homeless addicts, despoiled habitat. at a social level enough people need to get over culture wars and build a pragmatic alliance of religious and non religious views that agree on culture of accountability (socializing youth & recovering adults toward challenge), albeit with different conceptions underlying this value - to counter the narrowing of science thinking, to remove the neutrality barrier.
The New Puritan paradigm interacts with the advance of hazard engineering (in addition to designing what we want to go right, also design what could go wrong). Systems and hazard engineering are critical pieces of current social advance or modernization, but again they can be subject to self serving tangents among the domain practitioners and orgs. Afterall climate catastrophe, intersectional victimhood, industrial-corporate conspiracy, radiophobia, and paranoia in general are all perceptions of hazards. Hazard engineering bureaucracies can feather their funding with exaggeration of hazard or phony hazards they are paid to 'mitigate'. The maturing of hazard engineering practice and its supplanting the fearful guilty fantasy reaction to hazard is an important thread of advance, of competent state and private bodies.
structurally the state at some point needs to establish something like Tariq Ramadan's concept of ethic councils within knowledge domains, with religious and non religious representatives that explore and recommend controls for ethic issues created by advancing technology. the knowledge from these bodies could help signal the wider range of exploration we need to restore in the scientific domains, help remove the science minded from the sidelines and engage them in ethic development especially within their own domains.
Calls for more and diverse research is a good thing. Your argument seems to boil down to "we need to bust the IPCC trust because they are a trust and trusts are bad". What is missing is a compelling reason to do so beyond trust-busting as a virtue. While this post is well-sourced, sources were needed for this:
>Like other monopolies, as the IPCC acts in its own best interest, quality declines, and innovation is slow.
Whether quality has declined or innovation has been slow is not readily apparent. A delve into examples of this, or examples of promising alternative models, would add a lot of needed meat to your argument.
One thing that gave me pause was your mention of peer review towards the end. Is the intent to disseminate through these contemporary channels with an alternative means of peer review, or is the intent to bypass peer review entirely?
You point at ">Like..." this was a topic sentence prepping my reference to Tol. It was a synopsis.
You bring up a good question at the end. There are significant problems with academic journal peer review. Perhaps one of the biggest problems being the weight the process is given from the public in designating truth and knowledge progress. Knowledge production is a discourse rather than a faucet drip, paper by paper. My mentioning the problem comes from observing the really great research being produced through alternative channels (e.g. research centers like BTI) that in an academic department would be lumped under "service" receiving a shrug from academic colleagues. Yet, these works can be really important for viewpoint diversity, discourse, and in encouraging researchers to think differently then what academic norms demand.
wrt
“the IPCC holds a natural monopoly on science advice for climate change policy. It’s not that there are no alternative views available; it’s that the dominance of the IPCC hinders the competitiveness of these views”
this is very true.
I have directly experienced this. Here is an example which I documented on my weblog
https://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2009/01/13/protecting-the-ipcc-turf/
Two other examples are the two assessment reports
National Research Council, 2005: Radiative forcing of climate change: Expanding the concept and addressing uncertainties. Committee on Radiative Forcing Effects on Climate Change, Climate Research Committee, Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Division on Earth and Life Studies, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 208 pp
Kabat, P., Claussen, M., Dirmeyer, P.A., J.H.C. Gash, L. Bravo de Guenni, M. Meybeck, R.A. Pielke Sr., C.J. Vorosmarty, R.W.A. Hutjes, and S. Lutkemeier, Editors, 2004: Vegetation, water, humans and the climate: A new perspective on an interactive system.Springer, Berlin, Global Change - The IGBP Series, 566 pp
which the IPCC has essentially ignored.
Thank you for your excellent posts!
Roger Pielke Sr
You're on to something important here, but I'd offer a semantic nitpick:
It isn't "knowledge" that the IPCC has a "stranglehold" on. It's credibility among voters and policy makers.
There is plenty of relevant knowledge that the IPCC chooses to mischaracterize or ignore. One only has to consult Clintel's review of the IPCC Summary for Policymakers or the many critiques - often devastating - of the CO2 climate catastrophe story.
The appeal to authority citing the IPCC works far better than it should. The body was set up to investigate anthropogenic global warming damaging to humanity. The mission statement assumes at the outset a result in scientific inquiries that are central to climate policy.
An absurd situation, and yet here we are. Jonathan Swift would have loved it.
If memory serves, the global warming theory was originally concocted to explain why the Earth maintains a warm atmosphere and surface temperature at all. Some analysis claimed that without CO2 in the atmosphere we'd always be freezing to death.
Forgotten was that the 8000 mile diameter earth is MOSTLY INCREDIBLY HOT LAVA with a thin crust and even thinner atmosphere (100 miles approx). Since, apparently, no one knows how to calculate the heat transfer from the lava to the surface, it is omitted from "global warming" calculations!
Maybe if you don't know how to analyze a phenomenon YOU SHOULDN'T propose policy! Let me know if I am way off-base.
Hooray for common sense and full throated, uncensored science! Terrific article! Thank you.
The climate science enterprise has some tightly held and radically consequential assumptions
The choice of 2° or 1.5° is the result of politicians asking scientists, "at what point do significant changes begin?" and getting the answer of 2°. Then they ask the scientists what policy path would result in 2° of warming. Then they *don't* ask, "What policies are most effective?"
Neither the target or the policy proposed to reach it is scientific. And this is all referred to as a scientific consensus. According to Bloomberg a 2° policy costs $34 trillion more than what they refer to as the economically optimal policy of about 2.5°. Incredibly their angle on this is that 2050 net zero is justified because that $34 trillion is only 20% more expensive. Even these economists who are aware of alternate paths hew tightly to the political consensus
Another seemingly entirely ignored issue is that higher marginal costs to low income people globally apply to both climate effects and climate policy effects
There's a lot of very scientifically, and politically, legitimate space that the IPCC has left wide open for a worthy competitor
with the expansion of governance globally and in many domains, the non governmental associations of experts & advocates assert more weight in policy and paradigm, and can settle into self-perpetuating 'cartels' or 'complex' anchored around paradigmatic fads, such as the climate sensational-investor risk tea party the Republicans investigated for collusion. societies are challenged to increase state capacity to accelerate distribution of the technology advance coursing through the production and finance sectors, yet how do we keep the public bodies and practitioners on track, or more specifically how do they keep themselves on track? the state capacity needed is much broader than clear policy and coherent regulation, it includes competent bodies to manage/partner in research & commercialization, infrastructure, and local jurisdiction full learning-employment and conservation of ecosystems. State capacity is the basic policy alternative to the protectionist partition of commerce and scientific exchange and associated escalation of secessionist conflict into war that the west is testing now.
the trust busting, NSF research initiatives, and universities rewarding diverse/contrary research suggested in this article are likely useful. restraining or channeling the western drive to censor and deplatform science, social science application, and social media would likely also be helpful to weaken the professional and institutional pressures that sanitize and constrain science too narrow. there are no doubt myriad lessons in the chinese approach of performance incentives for public sector administrators and bodies, and the resultant of enhanced technical ecosystems. the 60s long march through the institutions has come to fruition and it illustrates long term battle within organizations to learn new things and reject old paradigms with trial and error and room for serendipity.
another problem of structure & paradigm is the ethic neutrality position within science and the broader separation of church and state. we removed the catholic control over the euro middle ages great, we have more pressing problems now. neutrality toward ethic questions ('private matter') was probably convenient for the science minded and did little damage when traditional religions shouldered ethic development of families. Now neutrality has logically progressed to victim worship, in the realm of environment the victim is Mother Nature. Public education probably the strongest external foundation for families is prohibited from cultivating ethics among students. At a broad level this is another self serving complex, victimology policies generate ever more clients for the victim brokers to tend - failing students, homeless addicts, despoiled habitat. at a social level enough people need to get over culture wars and build a pragmatic alliance of religious and non religious views that agree on culture of accountability (socializing youth & recovering adults toward challenge), albeit with different conceptions underlying this value - to counter the narrowing of science thinking, to remove the neutrality barrier.
The New Puritan paradigm interacts with the advance of hazard engineering (in addition to designing what we want to go right, also design what could go wrong). Systems and hazard engineering are critical pieces of current social advance or modernization, but again they can be subject to self serving tangents among the domain practitioners and orgs. Afterall climate catastrophe, intersectional victimhood, industrial-corporate conspiracy, radiophobia, and paranoia in general are all perceptions of hazards. Hazard engineering bureaucracies can feather their funding with exaggeration of hazard or phony hazards they are paid to 'mitigate'. The maturing of hazard engineering practice and its supplanting the fearful guilty fantasy reaction to hazard is an important thread of advance, of competent state and private bodies.
structurally the state at some point needs to establish something like Tariq Ramadan's concept of ethic councils within knowledge domains, with religious and non religious representatives that explore and recommend controls for ethic issues created by advancing technology. the knowledge from these bodies could help signal the wider range of exploration we need to restore in the scientific domains, help remove the science minded from the sidelines and engage them in ethic development especially within their own domains.
Calls for more and diverse research is a good thing. Your argument seems to boil down to "we need to bust the IPCC trust because they are a trust and trusts are bad". What is missing is a compelling reason to do so beyond trust-busting as a virtue. While this post is well-sourced, sources were needed for this:
>Like other monopolies, as the IPCC acts in its own best interest, quality declines, and innovation is slow.
Whether quality has declined or innovation has been slow is not readily apparent. A delve into examples of this, or examples of promising alternative models, would add a lot of needed meat to your argument.
One thing that gave me pause was your mention of peer review towards the end. Is the intent to disseminate through these contemporary channels with an alternative means of peer review, or is the intent to bypass peer review entirely?
You point at ">Like..." this was a topic sentence prepping my reference to Tol. It was a synopsis.
You bring up a good question at the end. There are significant problems with academic journal peer review. Perhaps one of the biggest problems being the weight the process is given from the public in designating truth and knowledge progress. Knowledge production is a discourse rather than a faucet drip, paper by paper. My mentioning the problem comes from observing the really great research being produced through alternative channels (e.g. research centers like BTI) that in an academic department would be lumped under "service" receiving a shrug from academic colleagues. Yet, these works can be really important for viewpoint diversity, discourse, and in encouraging researchers to think differently then what academic norms demand.
Jessica Weinkle
Well thought-out and written. Thanks Jessica!