New article in Nature says IPCC refused examination of how it distinguishes science from "value judgments"

Article published today in Nature co-authored by Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA) [where the Climategate e-mails were obtained].

IPCC: Climate panel is ripe for examination

• Mike Hulme
• & Martin Mahony

• Affiliations
• Corresponding author

Nature

 

502,

 

624

 

(31 October 2013)

 

doi:10.1038/502624c

Published online

 

30 October 2013

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Sociologists of science wish to study the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the same reason that they want to examine other loci at which scientific knowledge is made — whether in a laboratory, the field, a museum or at a conference. We too approached the IPCC in autumn 2010 with a request to study it from the inside; we too were told ‘no’ (see Nature 502, 281; 2013).

We therefore had to rely on self-reported accounts. Using document analysis and interviews with lead authors, we analysed how authors navigate the distinction between scientific description and value judgements, for example when offering information pertaining to the definition of ‘dangerous climate change’. 

The IPCC has become a dominant institution in climate science — in the assessment of knowledge for policy-making, and in how assessment practices alter empirical and computer-simulated climate science. Global knowledge assessments such as those undertaken by the IPCC call for carefully documented systematic studies by trained ethnographers.

Let us hope that the IPCC will recognize itself as a legitimate object for scholarly investigation this time around.

Mike Hulme, Martin Mahony
King’s College London, UK.
mike.hulme@kcl.ac.uk