BERLIN — After racing against the clock in an all-night session, the United Nations’ expert panel on climate change was putting the final touches Saturday on a scientific guide to help governments, industries and regular people take action against global warming.
As always when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change adopts one of its high-profile reports, the week-long talks in Berlin were slowed by wrangling between scientists and governments over which words, charts and tables to use in the roughly 30-page summary of a much bigger scientific report.
The painstaking process is meant to clarify the complex world of climate science for nonscientists. It also reflects the brinkmanship that characterizes international talks on climate action — so far unsuccessful in stopping the rise of man-made carbon emissions blamed for global warming.
“Sometimes it’s framed as if what the IPCC does is ‘just the facts, ma’am,’ and that of course is not accurate,” said Steve Rayner, an Oxford scientist who has taken part in three of the IPCC’s previous assessments, but not this one. “It’s not pure science, and it’s not just politics,” but a blend of both.
Swedish environmental economist Thomas Sterner, an author of one of the chapters in the report, said the IPCC process can be frustrating to scientists. “There’s a fight over every comma sign,” he told AP.
In a blog post from Berlin, he said scientists addressing the meeting were told, “Keep our statements short and concise, avoid jargon, do not lecture the delegates, do not become emotional.”
Chris Field, co-chairman of another IPCC session in Japan last month, said one way to think about the process is that scientists have control of a two-way valve and can move findings into or out of the summary for policymakers. The governments have a one-way valve and can only move things out of the document.
The final document, to be released Sunday, is expected to say that a global shift to renewable energy from fossil fuels such as oil and coal are required to avoid potentially devastating sea-level rise, flooding, droughts and other impacts of warming. The report was the third of the IPCC’s four-part assessment on climate change, its first since 2007.
