At the IPCC: an author's view of the recent SPM negotiations for WG3 (Mitigation)

[muriel_volestrangler]

An article written by a moral philosopher who was brought into the IPCC to address ethical aspects. He gives a good summary for why the Summary for Policy Makers should be largely ignored, since it is a political document (and says that the Technical Summary is not too technical for non-scientists, like him):

The section of the SPM that I was involved with came up early in the proceedings. It was quickly apparent that it could not be agreed in the Plenary Session where all the delegates sat. So the authors of that section were sent as a ‘Contact Group’ to a smaller room to negotiate the details with some tens of countries. We worked for three and a half days on one page. Meetings each day ran from 8 a.m. till midnight with hardly time to eat. The delegates made comments, we went away to rewrite the text on the basis of the comments, the delegates made further comments, we rewrote again, and so on. Several delegates in the meetings were sending their governments photos of the text on the screen as it was negotiated, and taking instructions from their governments by phone.

Late on Wednesday evening, during a brief break, the delegates formed a huddle in the corner, trying to agree text between themselves. We, who would be named as authors of the final product, were left as spectators. The US called in a more senior delegate. The main issue was whether we should mention a ‘right to development’, as the developing countries wanted. Eventually we were presented with a few sentences that, we were told, the developed countries would reject, and an alternative few sentences that, we were told, the developing countries would reject.

As he left the room, one delegate privately advised us not to depart far from his version of the text, because his delegation was very close to deleting the whole section anyway. This was the moment when I began to enjoy the whole event. The threat was not frightening. We privately pointed out in return that, if our section was deleted, we would no longer be authors of the SPM. We would be free to go to the press and publish what we liked. Moreover, all the ethics would have been deleted from the SPM. That would be embarrassing to whoever had deleted it, since the IPCC had been making a big show of incorporating ethics into its report.
...
The biggest drama developed during the last night. The draft SPM presented to the delegates contained figures that showed emissions of greenhouse gases from countries classified by their ‘income group’. The figures showed that emissions of ‘upper medium income’ countries soared in the last decade. This is obviously important information for policymakers. It helps to explain why, despite all the anxiety about climate change, emissions have grown recently at an accelerating rate. Nevertheless, a coalition of countries led by Saudi Arabia insisted that all figures where countries were classified by income group should be deleted.
...
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/05/08/john-broome/at-the-ipcc/

We also see that the Saudi Arabian government is evil.