Warren Pearce has a new paper out in Nature Climate Change that looks at the 2013 WGI press conference and the pickle that Thomas Stocker got into in trying to rebut questions about the pause.
Here we demonstrate that speakers at the press conference for the publication of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (Working Group 1; ref. 1) attempted to make the documented level of certainty of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) more meaningful to the public. Speakers attempted to communicate this through reference to short-term temperature increases. However, when journalists enquired about the similarly short ‘pause’2 in global temperature increase, the speakers dismissed the relevance of such timescales, thus becoming incoherent as to ‘what counts’ as scientific evidence for AGW. We call this the ‘IPCC’s certainty trap’. This incoherence led to confusion within the press conference and subsequent condemnation in the media3. The speakers were well intentioned in their attempts to communicate the public implications of the report, but these attempts threatened to erode their scientific credibility. In this instance, the certainty trap was the result of the speakers’ failure to acknowledge the tensions between scientific and public meanings. Avoiding the certainty trap in the future will require a nuanced accommodation of uncertainties and a recognition that rightful demands for scientific credibility need to be balanced with public and political dialogue about the things we value and the actions we take to protect those things.
The paper looks in particular at the questions asked by David Rose:
Various attempts were made by the IPCC speakers to downplay the importance of the pause. Stocker repeatedly pinpointed a lack of published literature as a problem (L436437, L568571) and claimed that temperature trends that last for less than 30 years should be treated as significantly less important than trends that last more than 30 years (L580584, L793795). This `temporal segmentation' enabled the pause to be dismissed as scientifically irrelevant, suggesting that journalists' questions on thematter could be ignored. Jarraud oered just such a dismissal to Rose's question, which he claimed was ``from a scientific point of view: what we would call an ill-posed question'' (L827828), essentially dismissing Rose as scientifically illiterate. The terms of this dismissal, however, seem inconsistent with the temporally localized claims made by speakers during the press conference. The speakers oscillated between two positions: one of broad certainty but little public meaning, the other of public meaning but little broad certainty (Fig. 4). This striking incoherence was noted by Alex Morales of Bloomberg News who asked why 15-year periods are considered by the speakers if they hold no scientific value (L965969).
When Rose published his article the following day, the quote ``your question is ill-posed!'' was given headline status, and derided as a misjudged response to ``a simple question''. We do not wish to claim here that Rose was particularly sympathetic to the IPCC before the press conference23,24, but in this instance his question was well founded. It exposed how attempts during the press conference to increase publicmeaning undermined the very scientific certainty that representatives were trying to communicate, and then leverage, to procure public meaning.
David Rose's questioning led him to be being branded "climate misinformer of the year". This paper goes a long way towards demonstrating that that particular accolade belongs to the IPCC.