For over 20 years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been tasked with pooling and making publicly accessible the knowledge gleaned from climate-change research. Its efforts were rewarded in 2007 with the Nobel Peace Prize — not bad for what is basically a voluntary organization staffed by thousands of working scientists. But in the past two years, the IPCC has displayed a talent for maneuvering itself into embarrassing situations, making itself an easy target for critics and climate skeptics, writes an editorial in Nature.
The InterAcademy Council Report (IAC) implemented by the UN urged 'fundamental reform' of the IPCC, including reading commentary on reports and no longer using gray literature as primary sources but they fought back and no changes were made at the top levels.
The lack of changes were evident in the recent discovery that a Greenpeace employee was a key author - and vetted his own work for the IPCC - but IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri has said new ethics rules and conflict-of-interest disclosures won't apply to anything in progress now, including the 2014 report coming out in three years. While such lethargic response to criticism is perfectly ordinary for the UN, it is unacceptable in science, where the public expects researchers to be trusted guides and wants to leave the advocacy and "framing" to politicians and political bloggers (including those masquerading as science writers).
Peer review does not mean much if the reviewers are your friends and you are on your own peer review committee. The IPCC, given its political involvement and the importance of its research on policy, should be much more cautious about its results. Instead, it seems like that as long as Pachauri is in charge, it will be business as usual.
Shot with its own gun - Nature 474, 541 (30 June 2011) doi:10.1038/474541a
