Apologies if my comment was triggering the sense that I am questioning published climate science. I don’t. I think / hope we are mostly misunderstanding each other.
With “politicized” here I do not mean that the report says inaccurate things, but merely that the selection of what is shown and how things are being framed in the SMP is a highly political result. And the climate scientists here are political agents as well, so comparing it with prior versions would not provide counter-evidence.
To make clear what I mean with “politicized”. 1. I do not think it is a coincidence that the fact that the graphic on climate impacts only shows very subtly that this assumes no adaptation. 2. And that the graph on higher impacts at lower levels of warming does not mention that since the last update of the IPCC report we also have now expectations of much lower warming.
These kind of things are presentational choices that are being made, omissions one would not make if the goal was to maximally clarify the situation because those choices are always made in ways justifying more action.This is what I mean with “politicized”, selectively presented and framed evidence.
[EDIT: This is a good reference from very respected IPCC authors that discusses the politicized process with many examples]
Yeah I think that it’s just that, to me at least, “politicized” has strong connotations of a process being captured by a particular non-broad political constituency or where the outcomes are closely related to alignment with certain political groups or similar. The term “political”, as in “the IPCC SPMs are political documents”, seems not to give such an impression. “Value-laden” is perhaps another possibility. The article you link to also seems to use “political” to refer to IPCC processes rather than “politicized”—it’s a subtle difference but there you go. (Edit—though I do notice I said not to use “political” in my previous comment. I don’t know, maybe it depends on how it’s written too. It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable word to use to me now.)
Re point 1 - I guess we can’t know the intentions of the authors re the decision to not discuss climate adaptation there.
Re 2 - I’m not aware of the IPCC concluding that “we also have now expectations of much lower warming”. So a plausible reason for it not being in the SPM is that it’s not in the main report. As I understand it, there’s not a consensus that we can place likelihoods on future emissions scenarios and hence on future warming, and then there’s not a way to have consensus about future expectations about that. One line of thought seems to be that it’s emission scenario designers’ and the IPCC’s job to say what is required to meet certain scenarios and what the implications of doing so are, and then the likelihood of the emissions scenarios are determined by governments’ choices. Then, a plausible reason why the IPCC did not report on changes in expectations of warming is that it’s largely about reporting consensus positions, and there isn’t one here. The choice to report consensus positions and not to put likelihoods on emissions scenarios is political in a sense, but not in a way that a priori seems to favour arguments for action over those against. (Though the IPCC did go as far as to say we are likely to exceed 1.5C warming, but didn’t comment further as far as I’m aware.)
So I don’t think we could be very confident that it is politicized/political in the way you say, in that there seem to be other plausible explanations.
Furthermore, if the IPCC wanted to motivate action better, it could make clear the full range of risks and not just focus so much on “likely” ranges etc.! So if it’s aiming to present evidence in a way to motivate more action, it doesn’t seem that competent at it! (Though I do agree that in a lot of other places in the SYR SPM, the presentational choices do seem to be encouraging of taking greater action.)
I came across this account of working as an IPCC author and drafting the SPM by a philosopher who was involved in the 5th IPCC report, which provides some insight: link to pdf—see from p.7. @jackva
Apologies if my comment was triggering the sense that I am questioning published climate science. I don’t. I think / hope we are mostly misunderstanding each other.
With “politicized” here I do not mean that the report says inaccurate things, but merely that the selection of what is shown and how things are being framed in the SMP is a highly political result.
And the climate scientists here are political agents as well, so comparing it with prior versions would not provide counter-evidence.
To make clear what I mean with “politicized”.
1. I do not think it is a coincidence that the fact that the graphic on climate impacts only shows very subtly that this assumes no adaptation.
2. And that the graph on higher impacts at lower levels of warming does not mention that since the last update of the IPCC report we also have now expectations of much lower warming.
These kind of things are presentational choices that are being made, omissions one would not make if the goal was to maximally clarify the situation because those choices are always made in ways justifying more action. This is what I mean with “politicized”, selectively presented and framed evidence.
[EDIT: This is a good reference from very respected IPCC authors that discusses the politicized process with many examples]
Yeah I think that it’s just that, to me at least, “politicized” has strong connotations of a process being captured by a particular non-broad political constituency or where the outcomes are closely related to alignment with certain political groups or similar. The term “political”, as in “the IPCC SPMs are political documents”, seems not to give such an impression. “Value-laden” is perhaps another possibility. The article you link to also seems to use “political” to refer to IPCC processes rather than “politicized”—it’s a subtle difference but there you go. (Edit—though I do notice I said not to use “political” in my previous comment. I don’t know, maybe it depends on how it’s written too. It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable word to use to me now.)
Re point 1 - I guess we can’t know the intentions of the authors re the decision to not discuss climate adaptation there.
Re 2 - I’m not aware of the IPCC concluding that “we also have now expectations of much lower warming”. So a plausible reason for it not being in the SPM is that it’s not in the main report. As I understand it, there’s not a consensus that we can place likelihoods on future emissions scenarios and hence on future warming, and then there’s not a way to have consensus about future expectations about that. One line of thought seems to be that it’s emission scenario designers’ and the IPCC’s job to say what is required to meet certain scenarios and what the implications of doing so are, and then the likelihood of the emissions scenarios are determined by governments’ choices. Then, a plausible reason why the IPCC did not report on changes in expectations of warming is that it’s largely about reporting consensus positions, and there isn’t one here. The choice to report consensus positions and not to put likelihoods on emissions scenarios is political in a sense, but not in a way that a priori seems to favour arguments for action over those against. (Though the IPCC did go as far as to say we are likely to exceed 1.5C warming, but didn’t comment further as far as I’m aware.)
So I don’t think we could be very confident that it is politicized/political in the way you say, in that there seem to be other plausible explanations.
Furthermore, if the IPCC wanted to motivate action better, it could make clear the full range of risks and not just focus so much on “likely” ranges etc.! So if it’s aiming to present evidence in a way to motivate more action, it doesn’t seem that competent at it! (Though I do agree that in a lot of other places in the SYR SPM, the presentational choices do seem to be encouraging of taking greater action.)
I came across this account of working as an IPCC author and drafting the SPM by a philosopher who was involved in the 5th IPCC report, which provides some insight: link to pdf—see from p.7. @jackva
Thanks, fascinating stuff!