Several news outlets perked up to a section in this week’s Nature in which five climate researchers with chairs at the table of scientific discourse  – including one who recognizes global warming as real but doubts it will be particularly bad – prescribe remedies for the ailing IPCC. Most of them urge a replacement. Most interesting of the lot may be the one from the University of Alabama’s atmospheric researcher John Christy – the semi-skeptic referenced a moment ago. He’d like to see a wiki-style effort from the grassroots of science that’d be less prone to group-think. Hmmm. Seems to me that one of the other notions or something like them ought to be adopted, PLUS a separate but well organized climatescience wiki to run in parallel.

I am tempted to filch the whole pdf of this basket of impressive opinion from Nature’s press-only site and post it here. But the journal, sensibly enough, wants non-subscribers and non-scribes to pay to read it so better not. In Grist below is a copy of Nature’s press release summary and a link to the abstract where one may, for some coin, open the whole thing. LATE ADDITION: Scrap all the immediately preceding. Thanks to an article at the site Sci Dev.net, I found a copy open to all, now in Grist).

The set of opinion pieces about fixing or replacing IPCC is paired with a more standard essay-report from a large, international climate science team that urges new, broader-based efforts to generate models of climate change’s impact more pointed, useful, and timely than ones now in hand. This is the one that generated the super duper Venn diagram in the thumbnail up there – a cleaned up version of what a committee meeting might scrawl on a big, easel-mounted piece of paper. If anybody with a pertinent job at Nature thinks even this bit of cut and pasting violates a trust, let me know and it will disappear.

Stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Scientists seek better way to do climate report ; He goes well beyond the op-eds in Nature and talks with several researchers dismayed by the IPCC’s few, but glaring, failures to vett its summaries’ verbiage. This piece was also,  briefly mentioned in a post filed yesterday.
• New Zealand Herald – Eloise Gibson: Climate panel facing calls to restructure ; It’s interesting to look in on  the seasonal perspective on news in media south of the equator. Cold some places up here, sure, but last we heard the down-under hemisphere is having a hot summer. Kiwi researchers, it appears here, would be happy to keep the IPCC as is – but with better adherence to its own rules.
• Christian Science Monitor – Peter N. Spotts: Is it time to overhaul the IPCC? ;

Other Notable Fix-the-IPCC Stories:

• Mother Jones – Kate Sheppard: How Wrong Is the IPCC? ;

Grist for the Mill:

Nature Opinion Article ; Nature press release ;

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