IPCC Vetting Process Leads to ‘Strangely Passive’ Language on Carbon Pollution
Intensive vetting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s assessment reports “weakens the urgency for climate change action” and leads to “strangely passive” language on measures to reduce carbon pollution, Kennedy writes. She cites Dr. Robert N. Stavins, an author of the 2014 IPCC report, who said the process for approving the report’s Summary for Policymakers is broken. “At the government approval sessions,” he wrote, “some 195 country delegations discussed, revised, and ultimately approved (line-by-line) the Summary for Policymakers (SPM), which condenses more than 2,000 pages of text from 15 chapters into an SPM document of 33 pages…Given the nature and outcome of the week, the resulting document should probably be called the Summary by Policymakers, rather than the Summary for Policymakers.”