SPPI ORIGINAL PAPER ♦ September 2, 2014

ANALYSIS OF THE SECOND ORDER DRAFT OF THE WORKING GROUP I

CONTRIBUTION TO IPCC 5AR

by John McLean

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I had hoped that the IPCC had learned from the devastating published review of their past procedures and results and that the IPCC promise to become more objective and inclusive in authorship and approach would be achieved with this report. The credibility of IPCC has been so badly damaged by the findings of the review panel and by Climategate that the only way it could become credible in the scientific world was to become an objective scientific body and present all data on all issues, not just biased selected data and invalid model studies. I really hoped that IPCC could become a truly respected scientific body, not just a political expedient. Thus, I am sadly disappointed in this report--it bases conclusions on very incomplete evidence, totally ignores huge volumes of relevant data that doesn't support favored conclusions, includes highly biased opinions and scenarios that are contrary to available physical evidence, excludes many of the world's leading experts, and projects a kind of fairlyland atmosphere where preconceived conclusions trump relevant evidence. This report does nothing to generate credibility in the real scientific world and the general population.

Comment SPM-156, by Don Easterbrook, United States of America

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CONTENTS Executive Summary ....................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 – Introduction ................................................................................................ 3 Chapter 2 – Background ................................................................................................ 4

2.1 IPCC procedure .................................................................................................... 4 2.2 Review period and actions ................................................................................... 5 2.3 Uncertainties in this Analysis .............................................................................. 5 2.4 A personal note .................................................................................................... 6 2.5 Guide to this document ........................................................................................ 7

Chapter 3 – Overview: The SOD Review as a whole .................................................... 9

3.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 9 3.2 Document scope ................................................................................................... 9 3.3 Reviewers and comments – the broad picture ................................................... 10

Chapter 4 – Government involvement and review comments ..................................... 12

4.1 For the main SOD review .................................................................................. 12 4.2 For the subsequent review of the updated SPM ................................................. 14

Chapter 5 – Comments by individual reviewers (general) .......................................... 18

5.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 18 5.2 Reviewers by number of chapters ...................................................................... 18 5.3 Reviewers by total number of comments ........................................................... 19 5.4 Merging number of chapters and comments ...................................................... 21 5.5 Reviewers who were also IPCC authors ............................................................ 22 5.6 Reviewers by country of residence .................................................................... 22

Chapter 6 – Comments by individual reviewers (chapter-by-chapter) ........................ 23

6.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 23 6.2 Summary of individual reviewers and comments per chapter ........................... 23 6.3 Number of comments by reviewers ................................................................... 24 6.4 Reviewers who were also IPCC authors ............................................................ 25

Chapter 7 – The review of chapter 10 .......................................................................... 27

7.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 27 7.2 Reviewer groupings ........................................................................................... 27 7.3 Government contributions ................................................................................. 29 7.4 Individual contributions ..................................................................................... 30 7.5 Comment focus .................................................................................................. 30 7.6 Executive Summary modified ............................................................................ 31 7.7 Changes to statements of likelihood .................................................................. 32

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Chapter 8 – Analysis of the review of the SPM ........................................................... 33

8.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 33 8.2 Government review ............................................................................................ 33 8.3 Review by individuals ........................................................................................ 34 8.4 Page-comments profile ...................................................................................... 35 8.5 Some comments and their responses ................................................................. 36

Chapter 9 – Interesting comments and/or responses .................................................... 39

9.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 39 9.2 Reviewers attacking the system and the IPCC .................................................. 39 9.3 Percentages and opinions ................................................................................... 40 9.4 Is the temperature data accurate? ....................................................................... 41 9.5 Deliberately forgetting the past? ........................................................................ 42 9.6 The late inclusion of papers by IPCC Authors .................................................. 43 9.7 The use of models that the IPCC admits are flawed .......................................... 44 9.8 Attributing cause ................................................................................................ 47 9.9 Other notable responses ..................................................................................... 48 9.10 On "deniers" and "sceptics" ............................................................................. 50

Chapter 10 – Summaries and Conclusions .................................................................. 52

10.1 About the review comments ............................................................................ 52 10.2 About the IPCC ................................................................................................ 54 10.3 The bigger picture ............................................................................................ 55

APPENDIX – Supplementary Material ....................................................................... 56

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Executive Summary The second order draft of the Working Group I (WGI) contribution to IPCC report AR5 had 821 reviewers of whom 26 were governments, one was the WGI TSU and 794 were individuals, 225 of whom were also IPCC WGI authors of either AR5 or the AR4 (published in 2007). The reviewers made a total 31021 comments, the above groups contributing 7858, 1044 and 22119 respectively. The reviewers commented on the draft versions of 14 chapters, a Technical Summary and a Summary for Policymakers, and made general comments that were designated as  “chapter  0”,  making  a  notional  17  documents. Ignoring chapter 0, the number of reviewers per chapter varied from 88 to 172 and the total number of comments ranged from 1094 to approaching three times that figure at 2893. Of the 26 governments, six (23.1%) made 20 comments or less and 51.0% commented on less than four chapters. When the author-reviewers are combined with the other individuals we find that 60% of them made 20 comments or less and 48.6% of them commented on just one chapter. Together these suggest that the review was less thorough than IPCC's bland presentation of the numbers might suggest. Reviewers’   comments   varied   from   editorial   issues   (e.g. spelling errors) to protestations about omissions, flawed assumptions and exaggerations in the draft document. In particular, doubts about the credibility of the output of climate models were dismissed, this despite the draft report pointing out that models failed to predict the actual (or very near) absence of warming from 1998 onwards. Two individual reviewers argued that IPCC statements of likelihood on two different issues should be modified, one from “very  likely”  to  “likely”,  the  other  vice  versa  and  both were successful in having the text modified. Several review comments from governments displayed ignorance, with some even claiming that warming was continuing, which contradicted the easily accessed HadCRUT temperature data that the IPCC uses. One government comment raised the hackneyed and irrelevant issue that the last decade was the warmest on record, and another  made  reference  to  “Mother  Earth”. With few exceptions government policies are closely linked to IPCC claims so it was surprising to find several governments complaining about the difficulty of understanding the Summary for Policymakers.

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The Scientific Method had been defined, for example, by Richard Feynman (Feynman, Richard (1965), The Character of Physical Law, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, ISBN 0-262-56003-8.; p. 156) as follows: "In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience; compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong." As a consequence of this definition, a single piece of contradictory evidence is sufficient to reject a hypothesis, whereas no amount of corroborating evidence may prove or confirm a hypothesis - by stating otherwise one would commit a logical fallacy called "affirming the consequent/denying the antecedent" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy). The logical fallacy of this Chapter is in making the (implicit and ever present in the Report) statement that it is the anthropogenically produced carbon dioxide that is causing the global warming, based on the knowledge that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases affect climate to some extent. In other words, they accept the AGW hypothesis as final truth, without even trying to use the Scientific Method and test the hypothesis. By doing that, this key Chapter and the entire Report assume a non-scientific dogmatic approach, as all of the previous Reports uniformly do, which necessarily and inevitably produces non-scientific (and, as I shall demonstrate, fraudulent) conclusions.

Comment 9-74, by Igor Khmelinskii, Portugal

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Chapter 1 – Introduction The preparation of IPCC Assessment Reports involves several stages, three of which are designated "Expert Review", "Expert and Government Review" and "Government Review". These three stages respectively address the first order draft (FOD), the second order draft (SOD) and the near-final draft of the Summary for Policymakers. Of particular interest to the wider scientific community is the review of the SOD of the Working Group I contribution to these assessment reports because this is the last stage at which individual reviewers can comment on the draft document. The Working Group I contribution to the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (5AR) was released in late 2013 and published in hard copy form earlier this year. IPCC authors are required to respond in writing to each review comment. Both the comments and responses are now available online via the link labelled "Drafts and review Materials" on web page http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/. (A web search also revealed that the files containing review comments and responses, along with other files, are available at http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/.) In 2007 I analysed the review of the Working Group I contribution to the Fourth IPCC assessment report1 but I took no part in the review process. That changed in 2012 when the IPCC granted my request to be a reviewer of the 5AR. As it turned out I made the most comments of any reviewer, which made me somewhat reluctant to also analyse the SOD review, but with no one else stepping up to the plate and the above web links providing access to the data so that other might verify my work, I decided to press ahead and this document is the result of that analysis. This new review is unlike the previous analysis because it focuses not only on a statistical analysis but also various review comments, many of which were simply noticed in passing.

1 http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/mclean/mclean_IPCC_

review_final_9-5-07.pdf

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Chapter 2 – Background 2.1 IPCC procedure The IPCC document "Appendix A to the Principles Governing IPCC Work" (see web page http://www.ipcc.ch/organization/organization_procedures.shtml) describes the process of creating an assessment report as follows, with step 4b the review of the second order draft (SOD):

To ensure proper preparation and review, the following steps should be undertaken: 1. Compilation of lists of potential Coordinating Lead Authors, Lead Authors, Contributing

Authors, Review Editors and of Government Focal Points. 2. Selection of Coordinating Lead Authors, Lead Authors and Review Editors. 3. Preparation of draft Report. 4. Review

a. First Review (by experts). b. Second Review (by governments and experts).

5. Preparation of final draft Report. 6. Acceptance of Report at a Session of the Working Group(s) or the Panel respectively.

The above steps fail to mention that for assessment reports, prior to step 6 IPCC member governments negotiate revisions to the wording of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) and the remaining chapters modified as necessary to align them with the findings (i.e. conclusions) made in the SPM. The "Acceptance" in step 6 is not even an internal review but merely putting a "rubber stamp" on the text of the chapters. On the subject of reviews the "procedures" document says:

4.3.4 Review Three principles governing the review should be borne in mind. First, the best possible scientific and technical advice should be included so that the IPCC Reports represent the latest scientific, technical and socio-economic findings and are as comprehensive as possible. Secondly, a wide circulation process, ensuring representation of independent experts (i.e. experts not involved in the preparation of that particular chapter) from developing and developed countries and countries with economies in transition should aim to involve as many experts as possible in the IPCC process. Thirdly, the review process should be objective, open and transparent.

The IPCC paid little attention to the process being open and transparent until the Fourth Assessment Report (2007) when legal action was taken under the US Freedom of Information Act to have the review comments and the responses by IPCC authors made public. Later in the "Procedures" document we also find:

The Working Group/Task Force Bureaux shall seek the participation of reviewers encompassing the range of scientific, technical and socio-economic views, expertise, and geographical representation and shall actively undertake to promote and invite as wide a group of experts as possible. This includes experts nominated as Coordinating Lead Authors, Lead Authors, Review Editors or Contributing Authors as included in lists maintained by the IPCC.

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This passage encourages IPCC authors to also act as reviewers, which from the IPCC's perspective is understandable, but in accordance with being open and transparent surely such author-reviewers should have been clearly identified as such. 2.2 Review period and actions In accordance with IPCC procedures, eight weeks were allowed for the review of the SOD, which in this case comprised 14 chapters, a Technical Summary and the First Order Draft of the Summary for Policymakers, the SOD of the SPM being produced after any revisions to the other text. For the 5AR the review period was from October 5, 2012 to November 30. IPCC reviewers comment on as many chapters as they wished (and managed) to within the eight weeks available to them. The reviewers are provided with an Excel spreadsheet with predefined column headings, with those columns being respectively for the chapter number (or SPM), the start page, start line, end page and end line (which of course refer to the SOD rather than the final version) and these locating references are then followed by a worksheet cell in which to make their comment. The work is tedious because each chapter has about 65 pages and approximately 60,000 words. Reading and trying to comprehend this much text is very time-consuming but considering the text and constructing review comments adds even more time. Making five comments on two pages of text in one hour would probably be a good rate and five comments on five pages of text in that time a very good rate. 2.3 Uncertainties in this Analysis Let me say at the outset this analysis is unlikely to be 100% correct. I have attempted to cross check data as much as possible (eg. confirming that the total comments for a chapter always sum to the same total regardless of the method of breakdown) but the analysis is constrained by IPCC inconsistencies. The IPCC adopts no standard format for the names and other details about authors and reviewers. A name that appears as "John Smith" somewhere might be the same person whose name appears as "John D Smith", "A. John Smith", "J. Smith", "A.J. Smith" or "J D Smith". The self-nominated country for an author is not always shown and might change over time as the person changes location or the list shows just one country on occasion and multiple countries on another. Secondly two people might have the same name (eg. Bin Wang in AR4), or almost the same name (eg. M.G. Schultz and M. Schultz, who were different authors of AR4). Thirdly, names might sometimes appear with accented letters and sometimes without (eg. Eastern European names), and sometimes with upper case characters and sometimes without (eg. "van" and "Van" in Dutch names). Fourthly, names might at times be misspelled or simply change over time for various reasons (eg. women's names changing with marriage).

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These inconsistencies with names and details make it difficult to confidently conclude whether two names identify the same person or two different people. A further obstacle to analysis is that some reviewers appeared to be unable to accurately follow the simple instructions for entering their comments into the IPCC spreadsheet. Apart from identifying the chapter they were requested to record the start page, start line, end page and end line to which their comments applied. On many occasions the end page and end line are absent, in at least one case the start page was after the end page. Despite the above obstacles I am confident that if errors exist they should be relatively minor in the scheme of things 2.4 A personal note This analysis is not merely statistical because it includes my comments and interpretations. My view is inevitably influenced by the opinions I formed as a consequence of my previous investigations into the IPCC's history and processes. These opinions are based on the following: (a) The IPCC was established on the premise that a human influence was distorting

natural climate. As a line of study it was plausible, but it should only have been part of a larger investigation into all plausible influences on climate. Because of its narrow focus the IPCC is simply the means by which the UNEP made scientists into lobbyists to support its view.

(b) The IPCC's physical evidence is anecdotal and circumstantial rather than solid evidence. The IPCC regularly ignores the fact that historical data and common sense that shows or says that natural forces could have cause the weather and climate situations that the IPCC attributes to human activity.

(c) The IPCC has argued in the past "We don't know what else could be causing it" is only a reasonable argument when it can be shown that scientific knowledge of every plausible force is very high, and even then we shouldn't discount forces that haven't yet been recognised. Without this high level of knowledge backing it, the statement can be (and should be) interpreted as a confession of ignorance.

(d) The IPCC regularly tells us that climate models are flawed and yet and it claims those models provide a clear picture of the magnitude of the human influence on climate and it uses those models to predict future climate. (The IPCC might use the word "projections" but to the media and wider public they are taken as "predictions".)

(e) The IPCC's statements of likelihood expressed as percentages are phony because they imply a mathematical and statistical basis to those claims. IPCC procedures describe how these statements can be the opinion of experts, but we are never told who those experts were, what they were asked and what their responses were.

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(f) My final point is that the IPCC doesn't acknowledge its own role in the distortion of science. IPCC reports blandly say or imply that there are plenty of papers to support its claims and very few that don't. This isn't the product of a level playing field of scientific research but one that has been tilted by previous IPCC reports.

Here's how it works (i) The IPCC produces a report citing published papers and predicting significant

warming, governments approve the summary of this report and it becomes the authoritative version.

(ii) Governments bow to pressure from peer governments, the United Nations as a

whole, the United Nations Environment Program and the Unites Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This pressure is both direct from these bodies and indirect via the alarmist media statements that these bodies produce and the mainstream media uncritically reports and which the public, who vote governments into office, blindly accept.

(iii) The substantial government-funded research that seeks to support the IPCC's

view results in even more papers for the next IPCC report to cite and conversely a reduction in papers that suggest other causes, the reduction being seized upon as evidence that few scientists support any contrary view.

With my attitude it's perhaps not surprising that some of my review comments were rejected (i.e. dismissed) but I should point out, some were not.

[1-110 1 2 41 2 41] Do NOT use the term "computer models". The models you refer to are not models of computers. Further, engineering models are run on computers but are not called "computer models" but "engineering models". [John McLean, Australia] Response - Accepted - Text has been revised.

Equally, some reviewers who are known to strongly support the IPCC, and even authors of previous IPCC reports, had some of their comments rejected and some accepted. 2.5 Guide to this document This document progresses from a broad summary to look at the contributions of governments and individuals before looking more closely at the pivotal chapter 10 and a selection of various comments before summarising the review and drawing some conclusions. Every page of the IPCC documentary record of comments and responses says " Do not Cite, Quote or Distribute" but since it is a public document and the relevant IPCC web page says only that any use of the material should not state or imply that they are part of the final version of the document, I quote a considerable number of items.

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My subject is very specifically the review comments and responses for the second order draft and what they imply about the review process and the IPCC as a whole. In most cases the quoted review comments in this document appear in full, along with the responses they received. Where this is not done, except for the two quotes earlier in this document, the quotes are clearly identified. In quoting each review comment, I do not correct any spelling or grammar and, again except for the two earlier quotes, I provide as much of the identifying and locating information as is available. The locating information should consist of six items (see below) but often the last two are absent and in the case of Figures the last three might be absent. Further, chapter 0 is used to designate general comments rather than a specific document, page number 0 general comments about the chapter and line 0 general comments about the page. By example, the interpretation of the comment prefix [2-866 2 22 55 23 19] is as follows:

2-866 – Unique comment identifier 2 – Chapter number 22 55 – Subject text starts on page 22, line 55 23 19 – Subject text ends on page 23, line 19.

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Chapter 3 – Overview: The SOD Review as a whole 3.1 Introduction The review of the SOD of the WGI contribution to IPCC 5AR had 821 reviewers, comprised of 26 governments, 794 individuals and the WGI Technical Support Unit. The WGI TSU made its position clear in a review comment:

[0-19 0 0 0] WGI Co-Chair / TSU review comments have been prepared by Thomas Stocker, Gian-Kasper Plattner, Simon Allen, Alexander Nauels, Yu Xia, and Melinda Tignor [Thomas Stocker/ WGI TSU, Switzerland]

3.2 Document scope Fourteen chapters were reviewed, plus the Summary for Policymakers and the Technical Summary (Table 3-1). As well as these, general review comments were made under the heading of Chapter 0. This amounted to 1010 pages of text (main body plus supplementary material), 382 pages of references and 638 pages of Figures and Tables. See Table A1 in the Appendix for page counts for each part of each document. Chapter 0 related to no specific chapter or component. The average number of pages of text for the remaining 16 components was 64.1, with a further 23.9 pages of references and 40.4 pages of Figures and Tables, making 128.4 pages in total. CHAP NO. TITLE

0 (no chapter - general comments) 1 Introduction 2 Observations: Atmosphere and Surface 3 Observations: Ocean 4 Observations: Cryosphere 5 Information from Paleoclimate Archives 6 Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles 7 Clouds and Aerosols 8 Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing 9 Evaluation of Climate Models 10 Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional 11 Near-term Climate Change: Projections and Predictability 12 Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility 13 Sea Level Change 14 Climate Phenomena and their Relevance for Future Regional Climate Change TS Technical Summary

SPM Summary for Policy-makers

Table 3.1 – Chapter Titles

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3.3 Reviewers and comments – the broad picture The average number of reviewers across the 17 components was 120.9, of whom 13.4 were governments, 106.7 were individuals and 0.9 were the WGI TSU. These reviewers made an average of 1824.8 comments per chapter of which 462.2 were made by governments, 1301.1 were by individuals and 61.4 were by the WGI TSU. After separately calculating the percentages of reviewer groups and the numbers of comments made for each component, the averages across all components were as follows: Governments accounted for 11.6% of reviewers and 25.4% of review comments, individuals 87.6% of reviewers and 70.8% of review comments and the WGI TSU for 0.8% of reviewers and 3.8% of review comments. The analysis of the separate documents finds considerable variation in the number of reviewers and comments for each. Figure 3.1 shows the number of reviewers, split into government, WGI TSU and individual reviewers and Figure 3.2 shows the corresponding number of comments (data from Appendix tables A2 and A3).

Figure 3.1 – Reviewers per Chapter

The total number of reviewers who commented varied for each chapter, from 70 for "chapter 0", 88 for the Technical Summary, 95 for chapter 3, then over 100 for all other components, finishing with 158 for chapter 9 and then 172 for chapter 2. It is curious that chapter 2 had the most reviewers given its subject - "Observations: Atmosphere and Surface" - which would seem to be only mildly contentious. Chapter 9, on the evaluation of climate models, deservedly got reviewers' attention but chapter 10, the pivotal chapter for the entire report, had only the seventh highest number of reviewers.

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Figure 3.2 – Review Comments per Chapter of the SOD

As with the number of reviewers, chapter 2 received the greatest number of review comments. The SPM and chapters 6, 9 and 5 received the next highest number of comments, the number of reviewers likewise having these next but in a different order. Chapter 3 was the third lowest both for reviewers and comments. It received only 47% of the number of comments received by chapter 2 and the number of reviewers was only 55% of that chapter. Drawing conclusions about the number of reviewers and comments is impossible because we have no idea whether other reviewers examined the chapters but had nothing to say or, without very detailed and rather subjective analysis, whether the comments were positive, neutral or negative. A high number of comments might be to suggest additional material to cite, a reflection of the number of spelling errors in the text or substantial disagreement with the SOD text, tables or figures. Earlier in chapter 1, the third quote from the IPCC's Procedures says that the IPCC Bureaux should encourage the IPCC's Coordinating Lead Authors, Lead Authors, Review Editors or Contributing Authors to also be reviewers. An analysis from this perspective revealed that of the 795 individuals who reviewed the WGI SOD, 122 reviewed one or more chapters that they had been involved in writing. In total 175 were authors of one or more of the AR5 SOD documents, this adding 53 reviewers who commented on chapters that they hadn't written to the 122. In total 130 reviewers were also authors of the WGI contribution to IPCC 4AR (2007), of which 52 were not also authors of AR5. Adding the 175 authors of AR5 to the 52 of AR4 (and not AR5) we get 227 reviewers who were involved in the writing of the WGI portion of the two most recent IPCC reports, which is 28.6% of the total number of AR5 reviewers.

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Chapter 4 – Government involvement and review comments 4.1 For the main SOD review The level of government involvement in the review process is interesting given that with very few exceptions governments seem to strongly agree with the IPCC's beliefs. One hundred and ninety-five countries are members of the IPCC and yet just 25 countries, plus the European Union, played any part in the SOD review process. Table 4.1 shows the total number of comments by each of those 25 countries and it's worth bearing in mind that in total slightly over 2000 pages of text were presented for review.

COUNTRY Total Comments % of Total

European Union 990 12.6 Govt of Australia 1082 13.8 Govt of Benin 17 0.2 Govt of Brazil 80 1.0 Govt of Canada 680 8.7 Govt of Chile 36 0.5 Govt of China 38 0.5 Govt of Denmark 35 0.4 Govt of Finland 21 0.3 Govt of France 322 4.1 Govt of Germany 847 10.8 Govt of Iceland 28 0.4 Govt of India 84 1.1 Govt of Japan 104 1.3 Govt of Kenya 20 0.3 Govt of Morocco 14 0.2 Govt of Netherlands 135 1.7 Govt of New Zealand 75 1.0 Govt of NORWAY 261 3.3 Govt of Poland 107 1.4 Govt of Russian Federation 17 0.2 Govt of Spain 64 0.8 Govt of Sweden 23 0.3 Govt of United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland 406 5.2 Govt of United Republic of Tanzania 6 0.1 Govt of United States of America 2366 30.1

TOTAL 7858

Table 4.1 – Comments by Governments

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The United States of America made almost one third of all the comments by governments. Its comments plus those by the next two highest, Australia and the European Union, together account for 56.5% of all comments. Add the next two, Germany and Canada, and we find that just five countries account for 75.9% of all comments. As mentioned above, only 26 countries (including the European Union) made review comments. This is just 13.3% of the 195 countries that are members of the IPCC. The USA and Canada commented, as did most but not all western European and Scandinavian countries made review comments. Austria, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Portugal and Switzerland made no comments, the last-mentioned being where the IPCC has its headquarters and the country that played host to the Working Group I Technical Support team. Only Poland and Russia from Eastern Europe commented, only China, India and Japan from Asia, Benin, Kenya, Morocco and Tanzania from Africa, and just Brazil and Chile from South America. Conspicuously absent from this list are many countries that claim to under serious threat from climate change. If these countries have government advisors on climate change then why did they make no comments on behalf of their governments? Is it possible that these governments have no advisors and take their climate advice from foreigners? Do they leave the hard work to others but accept any benefits flowing their way? A summary of the number of chapters on which governments commented and the total number of comments by governments is shown in Tables 4.2 and 4.3

1 2 3 or 4 5 or 6 7 or 8 9 or 10

11 or 12

13 or 14

15 or 16 17

No of Governments 3 2 4 4 2 1 0 3 2 5 % of Total (26) 11.5 7.7 15.4 15.4 7.7 3.8 0.0 11.5 7.7 19.2

Table 4.2 – Count of governments by the numbers of chapters they commented on

1 to 5 6 to 10 11 to 20 21 to 50 51 to 100

101 to 500

501 to 1000 >1000

No of Governments 0 1 6 4 4 6 3 2 % of Total (26) 0.0 3.8 23.1 15.4 15.4 23.1 11.5 7.7

Table 4.3 – Count of governments by their total number of comments

Appendix tables A4(a) and A4(b) provide details of the number of comments per chapter by each government. From these we can see that the government of Benin made general comments ("chapter 0") and commented on the SPM. Denmark commented only on chapter 8, the Technical Summary and the SPM. Finland made 18 of its 20 comments on the SPM, the Netherlands made 67 of its 73 comments also on the SPM and Sweden made all of its 23 comments on that document. Spain made just 3 comments, 1 for "chapter 0" and 2 for chapter 1. Russia made all of its 17 comments on chapter 7.

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4.2 For the subsequent review of the updated SPM On completion of the SOD review of the WGI chapters the SOD of the SPM was created and governments invited to review this document. This time 32 the governments of countries commented on the SPM. Six governments that commented on the SOD made no comments on the new SPM – Benin, Chile, Iceland, Morocco, Poland and Tanzania – but 12 governments that hadn't commented on the SOD did so – Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Hungary, Ireland, Iran, Madagascar, Panama, Republic of Korea, Switzerland and Vietnam. The number of comments by each of these governments is shown in Table 4.4.

NAME COMMENTS Govt of Russian Federation 1 Govt of Madagascar 5 Govt of Finland 6 Govt of Islamic Republic of Iran 6 Govt of Kenya 7 Govt of Panama 7 Govt of Australia 8 Govt of Bolivia 8 Govt of Spain 9 Govt of France 13 Govt of Vietnam 17 Govt of Argentina 19 Govt of Brazil 19 Govt of Republic of Korea 20 Govt of Hungary 23 Govt of Austria 27 Govt of Denmark 31 European Union 36 Govt of China 37 Govt of New Zealand 42 Govt of Sweden 53 Govt of Ireland 55 Govt of India 61 Govt of Switzerland 65 Govt of Japan 82 Govt of Germany 95 Govt of Belgium 121 Govt of Norway 144 Govt of Canada 150 Govt of United Kingdom 197 Govt of United States of America 207 Govt of Netherlands 284

Table 4.4 – Number of comments on the next (and Final) draft of the SPM

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Governments had even more trouble following the IPCC's instructions for review comments than did authors, with many comments containing multiple points of discussion or dispute, which makes responding by IPCC authors difficult and sometimes long-winded. Some comments for this later SPM do however stand out for various reasons (and please note that IPCC authors did not respond in writing):

[SPM-31 SPM 0] Our Government fully accepts the anthropogenic origin of the ongoing climate change, but we consider to leave less points to attack at for the "climate sceptics". At some points, therefore, we recommend to avoid trials to cover or decrease the unestablished (unexplained) elements of uncertainty. [Government of Hungary] My comment: This is a government that seems convinced about man-made climate change and is apparently very concerned about what "climate sceptics" might say. [SPM-30 SPM 0] THIS IS ONE OF THE HIGH PRIORITY COMMENTS OF GERMANY: The SPM and the underlying report discuss a reduction in the surface warming trend during the last 15 years. We have several concerns with this matter (see also our specific comments on P 3 L 25-27, P 11 L 1-6): Reference to relatively small time spans like 10-15 years in the context of climate change could be misleading. As indicated in Chapter 9 (See Box 9.8), internal climate variability might account for most of the recent reduction in surface warming. Longer time spans and moving averages instead of consecutive averages of temperatures and temperature trends should be considered. This has also been the position of the authors in AR4, when they refused to show the 15-year trend of global mean temperature in Figure AR4-TS.6 with the argument that periods that short are dominated by short term variability and, hence, cannot be used for statements on climate change. According to the WMO, the classical period relevant for climate is 30 years (http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/wcp/ccl/faqs.html). If discussing such a short time span, why are exactly the 15 years from 1998 to 2012 considered? This is not consistent with the SPM of TAR and AR4 in which the temperature change since the year 1995 was discussed. Furthermore, the information is missing that despite the decreased warming trend the decade of the 2000s has been the warmest in the instrumental record. In addition, the underlying report and the TS label the recent reduction   in   surface   warming   as   “hiatus”.   The  web   site  http://thesaurus.com   gives   as   definition   of   this   expression   “pause,   interruption”,  http://www.merriam-webster.com   gives   “1a:   a   break   in   or   as   if   in   a  material   object,   2a:   an  interruption in time or continuity; break; especially: a period when something (as a program or activity) is suspended or interrupted. All these definitions do not appropriately describe the recent temperature evolution as there is not a pause or interruption, but a decrease in the warming trend, and the first decade of this century has been the warmest since preindustrial times,   see   Figure   SPM1.   (a),   lower   figure.   Hence,   the   expression   “hiatus”   is   strongly  misleading and should not be used throughout the report. [Government of Germany] My comment: Whether or not the first decade of this century has been the warmest is irrelevant to the question of whether warming has continued. The analogy is that since I was born the trend in my height has been upwards and for the last 30 years I've been the tallest in my lifetime. This does not however mean that I am still growing. On the difficulty of reading the document ... [SPM-59 SPM 0] As usual, the reading of the SPM is difficult given its very technical presentation, but this is hardly avoidable al-though unfortunate because the IPCC does not make real efforts to present SPMs that are readable by its primary audience, i.e., policy makers, but rather meant for the scientific community. The SPM focuses on what is known.

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This is good and correct. But sometimes it is as equally important to know also what is not known, or not well understood. For certain areas, such statements have been added, but it would make the SPM much more valuable to the general reader if this was done more consistently throughout the SPM. Apparently, it is impossible to avoid the use of a too technical jargon in the SPM. For example, the whole section on the radiative forcing is nearly impossible to understand without going to the underlying chapter and reading up on what is really meant with concentration versus emission-based RF, etc. This being said, this version of the SPM is in excellent shape. It is well balanced, highly informative, and carefully worded in general. The figures and tables are very well designed. The SPM covers important new issues compared to AR4, including ocean acidification. It highlights the long perturbation lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere and links cumulative carbon emissions with warming. [Government of Switzerland] And ... [SPM-64 SPM 0] Broadly speaking, the SPM does not read like a narrative. It is a choppy collection of disparate facts. And while it is a hugely valuable to scientists who want a quick reference, its utility for policymakers can be questioned. Consideration should be given to how the text could be smoothed to read more fluidly. [Government of United States of America] And ... [SPM-77 SPM 1 1 31 60] The Authors should recall that this report is a summary for policy makers and reduce the overly scientific and technical tone of the report to ensure that information is clear and relevant for policy. [Government of Ireland] My comment: When governments request simpler language it casts doubt on their ability to understand science and calls into question the basis for their climate policy decisions. Other comments ... [SPM-108 SPM 2 26 4 38] The SPM should address the current pause in surface temperature more explicitly and explain how heat has been absorbed by the oceans over the past 10-15 years. The temperature trends for air and ocean are addressed in the SPM but the text never puts this into context by explaining the regular staircase pattern of warming over the 100 years linked to changes in IPO and deep ocean heat flux. As such the SPM inadvertently perpetuates the erroneous notion that global warming has slowed. [Government of Norway] My comment: Norway seems to think that global warming has continued and that saying that it has "slowed" (to a halt?) is incorrect, this despite what IPCC AR5 says elsewhere and certainly in the final draft of the document, the SPM, that Norway is reviewing. The other questionable aspect of Norway's response is whether data for the IPO and deep ocean heat flux extend back 100 years and enable the drawing of confident conclusions. [SPM-111 SPM 2 26 7 11] It is important to highlight what is the contribution per region and country to the observed figures of climate change. This implies introducing global figures about contributions of developed and developing country Parties to climate change, since 1850. Also, the analysis must take into account the objective of the CBD, which is to allow Mother Earth to adapt naturally to climate change, and therefore the issue is about the incorporation of criteria regarding what is the capability of regeneration of Mother Earth/nature to climate change, in order to ensure the protection of the environmental integrity y of Mother Earth (according to the COP18 UNFCCC decision). [Government of Bolivia] My comment: When a government of a country speaks in terms of Mother Earth maybe we have more to worry about than a slight change in temperature.

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[SPM-1044 SPM 12 14 12 14] 'Will' better expresses the current situation. The line states "continued emissions of GHGs would cause further warming" - of course, if we stopped emissions we would also see further warming. So this statement could be misleading. [Government of United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland] My comment - I guess the UK government thinks that the additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is causing a net imbalance in the amount of radiation reaching the Earth's surface and that the Earth will have to warm slightly so that outgoing heat energy equals incoming heat energy. It's an interesting idea but the absence of warming since 1998 suggests that the impact of carbon dioxide on temperature, whether it be by back-radiation or due to the radiation imbalance, is negligible.

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Chapter 5 – Comments by individual reviewers (general) 5.1 Introduction As noted earlier, 794 individuals commented on the Second Order draft of the Working Group I contribution to IPCC 5AR. They commented on 1010 pages of text (main body plus supplementary material), 382 pages of references and 638 pages of Figures and Tables, making a total of 2030 pages of information. The analysis of reviewers presented here looks at the number of chapters, total number of comments and the country of residence of each reviewer. 5.2 Reviewers by number of chapters Table 5.1 shows a summary of the number of chapters on which each reviewer commented.

1 2 3 or 4 5 or 6 7 or 8 9 or 10

11 or 12

13 or 14

15 or 16 17

Individuals 386 182 151 46 8 8 4 6 3 0 % of Total Individs 48.6 22.9 19.0 5.8 1.0 1.0 0.5 0.8 0.4 0.0

Aggregate % 48.6 71.5 90.6 96.3 97.4 98.4 98.9 99.6 100.0 100.0

Table 5.1 – Counts of individual reviewers by number of chapters on which they commented Almost 50% of reviewers commented on a single chapter and fewer than 10% of reviewers commented on more than four chapters. The top reviewers by number of chapters are shown in Table 5.2, which lists reviewers commenting on more than two-thirds of the documents. The data should be viewed with caution because it says nothing about how many comments the reviewers made on each.

NAME COUNTRY CHAPTERS Peter Stott United Kingdom 12 Reto Knutti Switzerland 12

Francis Zwiers Canada 13 Robert Kandel France 13

David Wratt New Zealand 14 Igor Khmelinskii Portugal 14

Stephen E Schwartz United States of America 14 Vincent Gray New Zealand 14

Klaus Radunsky Austria 15 Urs Neu Switzerland 15

Adrian Simmons United Kingdom 16

Table 5.2 – Top reviewers by number of chapters (12 or more chapters)

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5.3 Reviewers by total number of comments Table 5.3 summarises the total number of comments made by each reviewer.

1 to 5 6 to 10 11 to 20

21 to 50

51 to 100

101 to 500

501 to 1000 >1000

Individuals 171 143 183 193 70 33 1 0 % of Total Individs 21.5 18.0 23.0 24.3 8.8 4.2 0.1 0.0

Aggregate % 21.5 39.5 62.6 86.9 95.7 99.9 100.0 100.0

Table 5.3 – Counts of individual reviewers according to their total number of comments Almost 40% of reviewers made fewer than 10 comments on the entire 17 documents and only 4.3% made more than 100 comments. The top reviewers, by number of comments, are shown in Table 5.4.

NAME COUNTRY COMMENTS Geert Jan van Oldenborgh Netherlands 152

Keith Shine United Kingdom 152 Masa KAGEYAMA France 153

Urs Neu Switzerland 159 Pierre Friedlingstein United Kingdom 168 Eelco Johan Rohling United Kingdom 178

David Parker United Kingdom 181 Jonathan Gregory United Kingdom 204

Phil Jones United Kingdom 218 Peter Burt United Kingdom 230

Stephen E Schwartz United States of America 271 Ileana Bladé Spain 297

William Ingram United Kingdom 303 J. Graham Cogley Canada 305

Nathan Gillett Canada 313 Adrian Simmons United Kingdom 388 Francis Zwiers Canada 494 John McLean Australia 531

Table 5.4 – Top reviewers by total number of comment (more than 150 comments)

The number of comments is shown graphically in Figure 5-1, with the reviewers in alphabetical order along the X-axis. The low number of comments made by most reviewers – 87% made below 50 comments – is very evident.

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Figure 5-1. Number of comments by each reviewer, the first of whom made 388 comments and the last 17 comments

The number of reviewers making fewer than 50 comments was further broken into a count by number of comments and the results are shown in Figure 5-2.

Figure 5-2. Number of reviewers and their total number of comments (excluding 50 comments and more)

Thirty-nine reviewers made a single comment for the entire review of the SOD documents and 44 made just two comments. In fact 429 (or 54.0%) of the 794 individual reviewers made 16 comments or less, which averages not even one comment for all 17 chapters, although as we saw above almost 50% of reviewers commented on a single chapter. Some comments from those making just one comment:

[0-135 0 0] No further comments this draft. [Benjamin R Miller, United States of America] Response - Noted.

[5-283 5 5 5 5 38] No comments on the text related to my expertise [Valter Maggi, Italy] Response - Noted.

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[5-25 5 0] I joined the IPCC review process as expert in climate reconstruction by documentary records, so my review only covers the chapter 5. After a detailed reading, I would like to congratulate the authors for their impressive work and synthesis capacity. The chapter is beautifully written and in my opinion it provides a very good, complete and accurate revision of the current knowledge of the past climate record and its interpretation. In particular, I think the chapter provides a quite good explicit discussion about the problems of the current temperature reconstructions based in proxy data, one of the key issues to be included in the AR5. I do not miss (to my knowledge) any major reference in the text so I have no particular comments. [GALLEGO DAVID, SPAIN] Response - Noted. Thank you! My comment: Others thought differently and made a total of 1642 comments on that chapter.

The reasons for making single comments very likely differ. The reviewer might have commented on the previous draft and wanted to acknowledge presence in this review; or the comments might be in relation to a subject area that was of specific interest to the reviewer. For 17 of these single-comment reviewers it was an opportunity to suggest that the IPCC report should cite a peer-reviewed paper that they had written. 5.4 Merging number of chapters and comments The number of chapters and total number of comments can be merged into a single scatter-plot (Figure 5-3). Unfortunately this masks the number of reviewers indicated by each graph dot. For example it fails to indicate that the 39 reviewers making a single comment must each have commented on one chapter.

Figure 5-3. Scatter-plot of number of chapters and total comments (multiple instances occluded) The data used to create Figure 5-3 shows only two instances where, above four chapters, more than one reviewer made the same number of total comments. Three reviewers made a total of 16 comments spread over 5 chapters and two reviewers made 22 comments spread over 6 chapters. Figure 5-3 suggests that if reviewers commented on more than four chapters it was very likely that they would make less than 100 comments in total. This is supported by the data for reviewed chapters and total comments, which shows that for more than four chapters 63 reviewers, of a total of 75, made less than 100 comments.

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5.5 Reviewers who were also IPCC authors Of the 795 individual reviewers 226 (28.4%) were IPCC authors either of AR5 or AR4. (I drew the line at examining the immediately previous report.) Some 169 (21.3% of the total) were authors of AR5 chapters and 127 (or 16.0%) were authors of AR4. These two figures total 296, which means that 70 reviewers of AR5 were also authors of both AR4 and AR5. 5.6 Reviewers by country of residence As Table 5.4 suggests with its 9 reviewers from the United Kingdom among the top 18 reviewers by number of comments, the number of reviewers from each country varied greatly. Table 5.5 shows all countries with 10 or more reviewers, the total number of comments made by those reviewers and the percentages of the respective totals. Appendix Table A5 shows the same table but with all countries listed. In total, reviewers came from 49 countries, which is 25.1% of the 195 countries that are members of the IPCC. Again we can ponder the scientific competence and even interest of the other 144 countries that were home to no reviewers. The United States of America was the home to almost twice the number of reviewers as second-placed United Kingdom although United Kingdom reviewers made almost twice as many comments per reviewer. Of the 18 countries shown in Table 5-5 eleven are from Europe, three from Asia, two each from North America and Australasia; none are from Africa or South America.

COUNTRY TOT COMMENTS REVIEWERS %TOT CMTS % REVS COM/REV United States of America 5020 210 22.7 26.4 23.9 United Kingdom 4953 107 22.4 13.5 46.3 Germany 1146 50 5.2 6.3 22.9 China 516 48 2.3 6.0 10.8 Australia 1543 40 7.0 5.0 38.6 France 926 40 4.2 5.0 23.2 Japan 210 37 0.9 4.7 5.7 Switzerland 884 36 4.0 4.5 24.6 Canada 1909 27 8.6 3.4 70.7 Netherlands 788 25 3.6 3.1 31.5 Norway 552 18 2.5 2.3 30.7 Spain 500 18 2.3 2.3 27.8 Sweden 457 16 2.1 2.0 28.6 Finland 188 13 0.8 1.6 14.5 Italy 229 12 1.0 1.5 19.1 Belgium 336 11 1.5 1.4 30.5 India 256 10 1.2 1.3 25.6 New Zealand 372 10 1.7 1.3 37.2

Table 5-5. Countries with 10 or more reviewers and the total number of comments from each

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Chapter 6 – Comments by individual reviewers (chapter-by-chapter) 6.1 Introduction On the previous chapter we looked at the total number of comments made by each reviewer. This chapter will look at the number of review comments made for each chapter and the types of reviewers making those comments. The second breakdown is to separate the reviewers who are also either authors of AR5 chapters or were authors not of AR5 but of AR4. 6.2 Summary of individual reviewers and comments per chapter The total number of individual (i.e. non-government) reviewers and their total number of comments is shown in Table 6.1. Chapter 0 is the designated label for general comments and should not be considered as part of the SOD or final version of the report.

Individual Reviewers

Total Comments

Chapter 0 55 151 Chapter 1 92 744 Chapter 2 155 2267 Chapter 3 78 774 Chapter 4 100 1434 Chapter 5 130 1643 Chapter 6 123 2041 Chapter 7 120 1647 Chapter 8 93 1161 Chapter 9 157 1786 Chapter 10 116 1849 Chapter 11 97 1026 Chapter 12 112 1033 Chapter 13 94 1192 Chapter 14 105 1139

Tech summary 72 780 SPM 115 1452

Table 6.1 – Summary of the contribution per chapter of individual reviewers

Chapter 2, "Observations: Atmosphere and Surface", provoked the most comments, followed by chapter 6, "Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles". Following them came chapters 9 and 10, on the evaluation of climate and attribution of climate change. At the other end of the scale were chapter 1, the introduction to the report, and chapter 3 which dealt with ocean observations.

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6.3 Number of comments by reviewers A break-down by number of comments by individuals on each chapter is shown in Table 6.1, with those figures shown as percentages of the total individuals' comments per chapter in Table 6.2.

No. of Comments Chapter TOTAL Chap No 1 or 2 3 to 5 6 to 10 11 to 25 > 25

Chap 0 42 7 4 1 1 55 Chap 1 32 18 19 17 6 92 Chap 2 45 36 23 31 20 155 Chap 3 29 16 16 8 9 78 Chap 4 28 14 16 26 16 100 Chap 5 43 19 31 21 16 130 Chap 6 33 20 20 27 23 123 Chap 7 30 24 18 26 22 120 Chap 8 30 20 10 21 12 93 Chap 9 48 35 23 34 17 157 Chap 10 44 24 20 12 16 116 Chap 11 31 18 14 24 10 97 Chap 12 43 24 18 19 8 112 Chap 13 29 14 20 21 10 94 Chap 14 34 20 22 15 14 105 TechSum 25 15 13 13 6 72

SPM 25 26 17 31 16 115 Average 34.8 20.6 17.9 20.4 13.1 106.7

Table 6.1 – Number of individuals who commented on each chapter, grouped by number

of comments (eg. 32 individuals made just 1 or 2 comments on chapter 1)

No. of Comments Row TOTAL Chap No 1 or 2 3 to 5 6 to 10 11 to 25 > 25

Chap 0 76.4 12.7 7.3 1.8 1.8 100.0 Chap 1 34.8 19.6 20.7 18.5 6.5 100.0 Chap 2 29.0 23.2 14.8 20.0 12.9 100.0 Chap 3 37.2 20.5 20.5 10.3 11.5 100.0 Chap 4 28.0 14.0 16.0 26.0 16.0 100.0 Chap 5 33.1 14.6 23.8 16.2 12.3 100.0 Chap 6 26.8 16.3 16.3 22.0 18.7 100.0 Chap 7 25.0 20.0 15.0 21.7 18.3 100.0 Chap 8 32.3 21.5 10.8 22.6 12.9 100.0 Chap 9 30.6 22.3 14.6 21.7 10.8 100.0 Chap 10 37.9 20.7 17.2 10.3 13.8 100.0 Chap 11 32.0 18.6 14.4 24.7 10.3 100.0 Chap 12 38.4 21.4 16.1 17.0 7.1 100.0 Chap 13 30.9 14.9 21.3 22.3 10.6 100.0 Chap 14 32.4 19.0 21.0 14.3 13.3 100.0 TechSum 34.7 20.8 18.1 18.1 8.3 100.0

SPM 21.7 22.6 14.8 27.0 13.9 100.0 Average 34.2 19.0 16.6 18.5 11.7

Table 6.2 – The data from Table 6.1 expressed as percentages of reviewers for each chapter

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We can also sum the first two columns of data in Table 6.2 to produce the percentage of reviewers of each chapter who made less than 6 comments for each chapter (Figure 6-1).

Figure 6-1. Percentage of individual reviewers making from 1 to 5 comments on each chapter 6.4 Reviewers who were also IPCC authors As reported in chapter 2 of this document, the IPCC encourages the authors of its assessment reports to also be reviewers. Some people might see these authors as having particular expertise in the subject but others might see them as potentially sharing the "group-think" mentality of IPCC authors and recall that experts in certain matters (e.g. Chris Landsea and Paul Reiter) have withdrawn from being IPCC authors because they objected strongly to what other authors were saying in draft documents. I believe the IPCC is doing everyone a disservice by failing to identify reviewers who are also authors because some readers will consider that the comments by those reviewers have additional credibility while other readers will see the comments as having less credibility. The analysis of reviewers who were also authors splits the reviewers into four groups. First are the authors of the chapter currently being reviewed, second are the authors of other chapters of the Working Group I contribution to AR5, third are authors of AR4 but not of AR5 and finally are individual reviewers who are not authors of AR5 and were not authors of AR4. The author groups are therefore mutually exclusive and no reviewer will be found in more than one category. Given the variation in the number of reviewers and number of comments for the various chapters the data is presented in Figures 6-2, reviewer numbers, and Figure 6-3, total comments per reviewer group, as percentages for each chapter.

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Figure 6-2. Reviewer types as percentage of chapter

Figure 6-3. Total comments per reviewer type as percentage of total for chapter For chapters 10, 11 and 12 author-reviewers made 62.4%, 63.5% and 69.0% of all comments by individual reviewers, and for chapter 8, 49.9%. Ignoring "chapter 0", author-reviewers made less than 33% of comments for just two chapters, 1 and 4. In terms of reviewer numbers, author-reviewers accounted for 50.5% and 50.9% of all reviewers of chapters 11 and 12 respectively. The full data, both as raw numbers and percentages, for the above Figures can be found in Appendix Tables A6 to A9.

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Chapter 7 – The review of chapter 10

[10-38 10 0] Chapter 10 is the most important by far. It deals with Attribution and provides the science base for the IPCC claim that recent warming is anthropogenic – in its Summary for Policymakers and elsewhere. It is therefore crucial that the evidence be presented in a transparent and reproducible manner. However, this is not the case. My critique is presented in the hope and expectation that the discussion will be expanded sufficiently so as to withstand scrutiny. After all, this IPCC report is likely to be the basis for far-reaching economic and political decisions. ... [S. Fred Singer, USA]

(Comment from the review of the First Order Draft) 7.1 Introduction The pivotal chapter of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report is chapter 10, "Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional". If a substantial part of any warming cannot be attributed to human influences then the rest of the IPCC report is worthless, save for some reasonable summaries (but doubtful interpretations) in the three chapters dealing with observations. The contributions of Working Groups II and III would disappear, except perhaps some chapters on adaptation, if a significant human influence could not be identified. In the bigger picture the rationale for the IPCC's existence would disappear. The SOD of Chapter 10 consisted of 129 pages, 70 were text or supplementary material, 23 were a list of references and the remaining 36 were Figures and Tables. I found a total of 2169 review comments, which differs from the IPCC's last listed comment being 2170. The difference is a reviewer's comment that contains only a name, and the IPCC response did not indicate the reviewer who posted it. The average number of comments per page was 16.8, but as we will see, the comments were not even distributed across all pages. 7.2 Reviewer groupings Just 11, or 5.64%, of the IPCC's 195 governments commented on this chapter. The question is whether the others were not interested in reviewing this crucial chapter or were unable to. In total, governments made 252 (11.6%) of the 2169 comments. The WGI Technical Support Unit (TSU) made 68 comments but they were not the only reviewers associated with the IPCC to review the document. Authors of this chapter (i.e. chapter 10), other AR5 chapters and Authors of AR4 chapters who were not also AR5 authors totalled 49 people (38.3% of all reviewers) and they made 1153 of the comments from individuals, which is 53.2%. Among the remaining 67 people who fall into none of the above categories and made 696 comments are 26 authors of cited papers. I have no idea whether these people reviewed chapter 10 because they were aware that their papers were being cited or they believed it likely, so I simply identify them as a separate group.

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After all the above have been excluded we are left with 41 reviewers who made a total of 413 comments, but if we exclude the 200 comments by just one of those reviewers we would be left with just 213 comments (less than 10% of the total comments for the chapter) from 40 people, two of whom were from the same establishment (employer, university etc.) as a chapter 10 author. Governments, the WGI TSU and IPCC authors made up 61 (47.7%) of the chapter's 128 reviewers and they made just over two-thirds, more specifically 1473 (or 67.9%), of the 2169 comments. Cited authors and "others" therefore were 52.3% of the total number of reviewers but made 32.1% of the total comments. Details of the above are shown in Table 7.1 and Table 7.2 shows the data from table 7.1 in percentage terms, the first two columns being percentages of the total number of reviewers and comments, the subsequent columns being percentage of the total comments for the grouping. Figures 7-1 and 7-2 show the first two columns of Table 7.1 in graphical form.

COUNTS Reviewers Tot Cmts Reviewer counts by no of comments 1 to 5 6 to 10 11 to 25 >25

Governments 11 252 3 2 3 3 WGI TSU 1 68 0 0 0 1

Chapter authors 15 266 5 5 1 4 Other AR5 auths 23 460 13 2 4 4

AR4 authors 11 427 6 2 0 3 Cited authors 26 283 14 6 3 3

Other 41 413 30 5 4 2 Totals 128 2169 71 22 15 20

Table 7.1 – Reviewers and comments analysis for chapter 10 by raw counts

PERCENTAGES Reviewers Tot Cmts Reviewer counts by no of comments 1 to 5 6 to 10 11 to 25 >25

Governments 8.6 11.6 27.3 18.2 27.3 27.3 WGI TSU 0.8 3.1 0.0 0.0 0.0 100.0

Chapter authors 11.7 12.3 33.3 33.3 6.7 26.7 Other AR5 auths 18.0 21.2 56.5 8.7 17.4 17.4

AR4 authors 8.6 19.7 54.5 18.2 0.0 27.3 Cited authors 20.3 13.0 53.8 23.1 11.5 11.5

Other 32.0 19.0 73.2 12.2 9.8 4.9

Table 7.2 – Data from table 7.1 expressed as percentages, the "Reviewers" and "Tot Cmts" columns as percentage of total and remaining four columns as percentages of the number of

reviewers for that group

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Figure 7-1. Number of reviewers by grouping

Figure 7-2. Number of comments by each reviewer grouping 7.3 Government contributions The government contributions to the review of this chapter are shown in Table 7.3, with three countries making fewer than 5 comments about the 129 pages.

COUNTRY COMMENTS Govt of Netherlands 1 Govt of China 3 Govt of United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland 3 Govt of France 8 Govt of India 10 Govt of Germany 12 Govt of NORWAY 13 Govt of Canada 19 Govt of Australia 33 European Union 47 Govt of United States of America 103

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Table 7.3 – Government contributions to the review of chapter 10

[10-25 10 0 0 0 0] This chapter is well written and short. Section 10.6.2 on extremes is especially clear. The discussions on the last 10 to 15 years and temperature levelling, for example in 10.3.1.1.1 and 10.3.1.1.3 are, however, weak and inconclusive [Government of United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland] Response - Noted. In the revised report the discussion of the lsat 10 to 15 years has been addressed by including a new box in chapter 9 that discusses the last 10 to 15 years.

7.4 Individual contributions The contributions by all individual reviewers is summarised in Table 7.4 (and in graphical form in Figure 7-3), which shows that 37.9% - more than one-third - made just 1 or 2 comments and 20.7% percent made 3 to 5 comments, meaning that 68 (58.6%) of the 116 reviewers made less than 6 comments.

Reviewers by no of comments

TOTAL 1 or 2 3 to 5 6 to 10 11 to 25 > 25

Count 44 24 20 12 16 116 Percent 37.9 20.7 17.2 10.3 13.8

Table 7.4 – Number of individual reviewers by number of comments

Figure 7-3. No of reviewers by number of comments

7.5 Comment focus With 129 pages on relatively contentious matters, compared for example with chapter 2, which was a summary of observations, it's perhaps not surprising that reviewers largely focussed on specific issues.

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The first 48 comments were general in nature, indicated by the reviewers using page number zero to indicate where it applied to the text. The remaining comments have the profile shown in Figure 7-4, with comments that apply to more than one page assigned to each of those pages.

Section From page To page Executive Summary 3 5

Main text 6 65 References 66 88

Supplementary text 89 94 Figures and tables 95 131

Figure 7-4. Profile of comments per page for chapter 10

To put this in context, the corresponding profile for chapter 2 is shown in Appendix Figure A1, which was constructed slightly differently. Because about 15% of comments had incomplete data for start page, start line, end page and end line a 'best guess' estimate of the end page was used when data was missing. Chapter 8 features a similar page-comment profile for the SPM. 7.6 Executive Summary modified Figure 7-4 shows that the executive summary of chapter 10 received a disproportionate number of comments relative to the rest of the text. The IPCC authors' responses show that significant revisions were made to the text.

Taken into account. The ES has been substantially revised and this sentence no longer appears. Taken into account. This statement does not appear in the revised ES. Taken into account. The ES has been substantially revised as part of which this statement no longer appears.

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Taken into account. The ES has been revised substantially and this statement no longer appears. Taken into account. A change along these lines has been implemented in the much revised ES. Taken into account. The ES has been substantially revised to improve clarity. Taken into account. ES statement has been revised. Taken into account. The ES provides the attribution headline statement from the new Box 9.2.

In fact not only was the Executive Summary of chapter 10 modified because a new text box, Box 9.2, was added to chapter 9. The problem with these changes is that they were not subjected to any further external review. Only the SPM is subject to any scrutiny after the review of the SOD and that's by government representatives who negotiate and adjust wording to suit themselves. All remaining chapters are then modified as necessary to align them with the government-negotiated and government-approved SPM. 7.7 Changes to statements of likelihood Two reviewer comments stand out in relation to the IPCC's statements of likelihood (eg. 'very likely')

[10-383 10 5 29 5 32] This paragraph relates to evidence from observations, not the results of climate model simulations (which may well be inconsistent with observations). As set out in more detail in my comments on Section 10.8.2, a 'likely' range of 2-4.5 C for ECS does not seem compatible with the best estimates from observational evidence cited in other chapters of AR5 WG1. Rather, such estimates points to a best estimate for ECS of approximately 1.6 - 1.7 C, not far above 1.5 C. That estimate implies that the bottom of a valid 'likely' range for ECS cannot be as high as 2 C. That best estimate is also far too close to 1.5 C for values below that level to be considered 'unlikely', let alone 'very unlikely'. Based purely on observational evidence, the lower limit of the 'likely' range for ECS should be significantly below 1.5 C. [Nicholas Lewis, United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland] Response - Taken into account; 'likely' range from observational constraints has been revised downward. And ... 10-930 10 21 14 21 14 Should this not be very likely - and also it should be italicised? [Phil Jones, United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland] Response - Accepted. Assessment changed to very likely and italicized. My comment: Is this what the IPCC procedures mean by canvassing expert opinion and is this all it takes to have the likelihood modified?

(In anticipation of a certain reaction I can assure you that the IPCC authors rejected many of Phil Jones's comments.)

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Chapter 8 – Analysis of the review of the SPM 8.1 Introduction The Summary for Policymakers (SPM) offered for review was the first order draft (FOD), with the second order draft of the SPM written after other chapters were modified as a consequence of the SOD review of those chapters. As indicated earlier, only governments reviewed the SOD of the SPM and no responses were recorded in the documentation available to the public. The FOD of the SPM consisted of just 16 pages of text and 9 pages of tables. A total of 136 reviewers commented on the SPM, of whom 21 were governments and 115 individuals. The WGI TSU made no comments on the SPM. In total the reviewers made 2861 comments, an average of more than 100 per page, with governments making 1409 and individuals 1452, in other words almost half the comments by each group. 8.2 Government review The SPM received the most review comments from governments of any chapter but only just over 10% of the IPCC's 195 member countries commented (see Table 8.1). Those that did comment were unusually diligent given the size of the document.

COUNTRY COMMENTS Govt of Chile 1 Govt of India 1 Govt of Kenya 3 Govt of China 10 Govt of Spain 13 Govt of Morocco 14 European Union 15 Govt of Benin 15 Govt of Finland 18 Govt of Denmark 21 Govt of Sweden 23 Govt of Japan 36 Govt of New Zealand 67 Govt of France 93 Govt of NORWAY 108 Govt of Netherlands 120 Govt of United States of America 133 Govt of Canada 148 Govt of Germany 157 Govt of United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland 197 Govt of Australia 216

Table 8.1 - Government review comments for FOD SPM

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8.3 Review by individuals A total of 115 individual reviewers commented on the SPM and a summary by number of comments is shown in Figure 8-1. As percentages of the total number, from top to bottom of the graph, the figures are 21.7%, 22.6%, 14.8%, 27.0% and 13.9% respectively.

Figure 8-1. Summary of number of review comments by each individual reviewer of the SPM The reviewers can also be divided into the three categories of IPCC authors and those not IPCC authors as described earlier. In this case the percentage (of the total) of reviewers in each group is close to the percentage of comments that they made.

Reviewers % Total Comments % Total Chap Authors 9 7.8 116 8.0

Other AR5 Authors 18 15.7 280 19.3 AR4 Authors 12 10.4 136 9.4

Other 76 66.1 920 63.4 Total 115 1452

Table 8.2 – IPCC authors and their impact on the SPM review

In total IPCC authors accounted for 33.9% of individual reviewers and they made 36.6% of the comments by individuals. Eleven individuals commented only on the SPM and 17 others commented on the SPM plus one chapter (or the Technical Summary). In total 74.8% of reviewers commented on this chapter and no more than four other chapters.

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8.4 Page-comments profile The page-comment profile for the FOD of the SPM is shown in Figure 8-1. As before, comments designated as being on page 0 are general comments and have been omitted. Unlike the earlier profiles this figure is based only on the starting page number rather than spanning all pages from the start page to the end page. This was due to a high percentage of comments failing to have an end page number.

Section from page to page Text 2 17

Tables 18 19 Figures 20 26

Figure 8-1. Page profile for the SPM

Further to Figure 8-1, the FOD SPM was split into the sections describe din Table 8.2 and the number of comments for each page, i.e. the data from which Figure 8-1 was created, are shown in Table 8.3.

TEXT SECTION START PAGE END PAGE

1.Introduction 1 1

2. Observation of Changes in the Climate System 1 7

3. Drivers of Climate Change 7 8

4. Understanding the Climate System and its Recent Changes 8 11

5. Projections of Global and Regional Climate Change 11 17

Table 8.2 – Start and end pages for the text sections of the FOD of the SPM

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Page Comments Page Comments

1 19 14 98 2 165 15 108 3 208 16 112 4 161 17 151 5 164 18 30 6 151 19 25 7 193 20 46 8 167 21 22 9 163 22 50

10 166 23 45 11 161 24 42 12 143 25 16 13 108 26 12

Table 8.3 – Comments per page other than page 0, which were general comments

8.5 Some comments and their responses Some comments about the SPM and the responses to those comments illustrate some concerns about governments' understanding and knowledge of climate science, and the sometimes excessively dismissive attitude of the responses from IPCC authors. The word "evidence" appears 236 times in the comments and responses, frequently in a form similar to "Reject. Reviewer fails to provide scientific evidence in support of his claims". The phrase "fails to provide" appears 22 times in the IPCC author responses.

[SPM-71 SPM 0] We want to stress the importance of clear and understandable language in the SPM. It is important that stakeholders, (such as politicians, government experts, journalists, industry and other stakeholders) who want to go beyond media reporting to read what the scientists are really saying, understands the SPM. [Government of NORWAY] Response - Noted. [SPM-82 SPM 0] As written, the SPM is not accessible to a policymaker or general population audience. Additional prose should be added to present a narrative that genuinely explains the Physical Science Basis. In addition, please consider defining critical vocabulary (within the SPM such that it stands alone) that may be obtuse to target readership but that represents pivotal concepts underpinning the case for human-induced climate change. This is an opportunity for IPCC to improve upon what has been done in the past – to reach the intended audience(s) more effectively. [Government of United States of America] Response - Noted. Improving the narrative has been a focus of the revisions towards the Final Draft. Regarding critical vocabulary the reader is referred to the WGI AR5 Glossary given the limited space available in the SPM.

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SPM-142 SPM 1 26 Overall treatment of the scientific uncertainties is adequate in this SPM, BUT (!) the overall treatment of the scientific certainties and near-certainties is grossly inadequate. This SPM gives a rather misleading assessment of the current state of the science, and conveys the impression that the science is much less certain and developed than it really is - and as such is a major failing of the text. Another major failing of the SPM is its concentration on the two extreme RCPs at the expense of the two more plausible intermediate RCPs. [Government of Australia] Response - Noted. We did try to be present the WGI assessment of the science basis of climate change in a balanced, accurate way. We hope the revised SPM meets these expectations better. We have expanded the scenario coverage and now also include RCPs 4.5 and 6.0 in a number of places, most notably in the time series Figure SPM.6.

The following comments either don't need explicit evidence or have evidence elsewhere in AR5 but the responding SPM author has chosen to ignore this.

SPM-725 SPM 5 13 5 14 The statement that "the Greenland Ice Sheet has lost mass since the early 1990s" may well be true, but what about pre-1990? Temperature records show that Greenland was warmer in the l930s than since 1990 and ice was undoubtedly also lost then. However, during the 1945 to 1977 global cooling the ice sheet grew. Leaving out this highly significant data is scientifically dishonest because the IPCC statement implies that the Greenland Ice Sheet is continually losing ice, rather than fluctuating between gains and losses. Because the warm climate of the 1930s occurred prior to the sharply increased human CO2 emission, Greenland doesn't prove anything about the cause of global warming--if anything it shows the these changes are natural and have nothing to do with CO2! [Don Easterbrook, United States of America] Response - Reviewer fails to cite evidence to support his claims. [SPM-867 SPM 6 3 6 12] There is a complete mismatch between measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which take place almost exclusively over the ocean, and emissions, which take place almost exclusively over land surfaces, This means that there is no scientifically observed relationship between them. The figures in this section are therefore subject to unknown inaccuracy [Vincent Gray, New Zealand] Response - reviewer provides no substantive basis for his claims. Statements in this section are based on the comprehensive assessment provided by chapters 2,3,5, and 6. [SPM-1413  SPM  9  7  9  10]  To  remove  absurdity,  delete  “There  is  very  high  confidence  that  coupled climate models provide realistic responses to external forcing. This is evident from simulations of the surface temperature on continental and larger scales, and the global-scale surface temperature increase over the historical period, especially the last fifty   years.”  Reason: The climate is chaotic and hence inherently unpredictable; the values of initial parameters are unknown; and not one of the temperature feedbacks that contribute two-thirds of all model-predicted warming can be measured directly. None of the models predicted there would be no warming for 16 years. Claiming   “very high   confidence”   that   the   models   are  realistic on the basis of hindcasting, when forecasting has proven so inept, is mere rodomontade. It is now time for the IPCC to admit the limitations of the models. [Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, United Kingdom] Response - Reviewer fails to provide a substantive basis for his claims. Based on a number of review comments, this revised paragraph now explicitly addresses the warming trend over the past 10 to 15 years.

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[SPM-1482  SPM  9  37  9  38]  To  remove  yet  another  hindcasting  claim,  delete  “There  is  high  confidence that most ESMs (Earth system models) produce global land and ocean sinks over the latter part of the 20th century that are consistent with the range of observational estimates. Reason: Yet again, the question is not whether models can be or have been tweaked to reproduce past climatic changes but whether they are capable of reliably predicting future change. [Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, United Kingdom] Response - Reviewer fails to provide any substantive scientific basis for his comment. [SPM-2609 SPM 19 1 19 12] Unless you can demonstrate that climate models are 100% accurate for all climate forces your projections are mere speculation and should be deleted or heavily qualified. [John McLean, Australia] Response - Reject. Reviewer fails to provide any scientific evidence in support of his claims. No action.

And some common sense is met with a demand for evidence

SPM-2634 SPM 20 1 20 5 The uncertainties are unbelievable when they are "available" so they are even greater when they are "not available". [Vincent Gray, New Zealand] Response - reviewer fails to provide any substantial scientific basis to support his claim. [SPM-1757 SPM 11 27 11 33] Here you go again making claims that have no solid basis because you cannot prove that climate models are 100% accurate. [John McLean, Australia] Response - The reviewer fails to provide any substantive scientific basis to support his claims.

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Chapter 9 – Interesting comments and/or responses 9.1 Introduction Apart from the reviewers' comments and responses quoted earlier there are many others that are interesting for what they imply or illustrate about the IPCC's position and sometimes about the reviewers. The quotes below are given in full, except in the last section of this chapter, and I explain why I find the comments and responses particularly interesting. Several review comments are my own but because I made more comments than anyone else and it looks like I was the only sceptical voice among all reviewers making more than 150 comments, the inclusion of my own comments here is hardly surprising. 9.2 Reviewers attacking the system and the IPCC

[2-80 2 1 200 9] This paragraph refers to the entire Chapter 2. Chapter 2 reviews some of the published information on the topic "Atmosphere and Surface". However, the motivation for the reviewed research effort and the logic behind it is more often fraudulent than not, as the respective research frequently follows the pseudo-scientific reasoning that "more corroborating evidence produces a stronger case for the AGW hypothesis". In fact, nothing can be further from the truth, as shown in my Paragraph 3. Indeed, no amount of corroborating evidence can prove a hypothesis, while a single piece of contradictory evidence is sufficient to reject a hypothesis. In effect, the only (dubiously) useful result of this research effort is the "general progress of science", resulting from wasteful usage of public money on climate studies, where no real problem requiring study may be found. Even the PhD degrees earned as a result of such research are of dubious (in the very least) value, as we are producing more pseudo-scientists certified as scientists, in addition to the already existing pseudo-scietists [sic]. Research based on the AGW hypothesis, known to be wrong, may provide no valid scientific results, as its conclusions are already known before the research even began - these conclusions being "AGW is happening, and we are to blame for it". Additionally, the data interpretation in the publications is frequently done based on the same climate models, which are demonstrably wrong (as shown in my Paragraphs 2 to 8), and therefore constitutes a fraud. [Igor Khmelinskii, Portugal] Response - Rejected. Chapter 2 is not about Anthropogenic Global Warming, not attribution statements are made, and no models are used. And ... [1-156 1 3 28] The review process is perhaps transparent but recommendations of reviewers are ignored. What is the definition of « appropriate views » ? Only those of IPCC authors ? But then, the review process, even transparent, would be useless. To further strengthen « inappropriate views », please plot temperature versus CO2 as it should have been done in any report since FAR. For 15 years, do you observe an ascending curve ? Not at all. It is roughly a plateau. Of course, during the ascending phase of the 60-year period sinusoid from 1975 to 1998 (see Box 2.2 Fig. 1 Bottom in this SOD), some correlation might have been suggested, but neither during the previous 25 years when Earth was cooling (in spite of the successive corrections always in the same direction to minimize the cooling, called homogenization), nor for 15 years. [François Gervais, France]

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Response – Rejected. This is a silly argument, showing that the reviewer really does not understand the climate system or its response to external forcing. There has never been suggested that there should an exact correlation between temperatures and levels of CO2. First of all, CO2 is only one of the forcings on climate. Secondly, climate change needs to look at time scales

My comments: Khelminskii made similar comments about all chapters of the report. Alas, a stampeding bull isn't stopped by tell it that it's a stampeding bull. Much of what he says is probably correct and in some cases demonstrably so in a few words. Corroborating evidence indeed doesn't prove a hypothesis; it reinforces a position but never proves it. Climate models are flawed - all IPCC assessment reports have discussed those errors and 5AR quantifies the discrepancy between their output and observational data - so it does follow that any papers that draw conclusions from the output of climate models must be flawed and by extension the authors, who must surely be aware of the flaws, are indeed committing actions tantamount to fraud. Gervais's comment is also very relevant - the IPCC claims that CO2 concentration drives temperature but during 1945-1977 and again 1998-2012 (or later) temperatures were flat despite increasing CO2. That the IPCC author should dismiss this as "silly" casts doubt on the knowledge of the IPCC reviewer. Incidentally this is the only use of "silly" by an IPCC author responding to a reviewer's comment but reviewers, Phil Jones and myself included, used the term 7 times in total. 9.3 Percentages and opinions

[1-747 1 14 6 14 6] The 90% figures are sheer guesswork, unrelated to any genuine study on uncertainties [Vincent Gray, New Zealand] Response - Rejected - Sentence explains treatment of uncertainties in WGI. And ... [8-817 8 37 3 37 4] The confidence levels expressed here are, according to chapter 1, the author teams' judgements "about the validity of findings as determined through evaluation of the available evidence and degree of scientific agreement." There's at least three glaring problems with this. The "author team" being referred to is, by my judgement, maybe two contributing authors, a lead author and a co-ordinating lead author. That's a whole four people, two of which were nominated by the IPCC and the other two subsequently invited by those nominated. This reeks of bias, besides which the sample of views is far too small to have any credibility. Next, the "evaluation of evidence" is phony when models are used because models do NOT produce evidence; they merely predict outcomes based on their algorithms and the input parameters, everything based in this table that was derived from the output of models should have its "confidence" downgraded. Finally "degree of scientific agreement" is merely a disguise for claiming a consensus, and surely you know that consensus doesn't determine scientific truth. Please find a more honest way to express your views, and make it very clear that it amounts to no more than opinion by a small number of people. [John McLean, Australia] Response - Rejected, the confidence level is decided by the whole Chapter author team (2 CLAs and 13 LAs) plus CAs as well as modified by reviewer comments. [CLA = Coordinating Lead Author, LA = Lead Author, CA = contributing author, these being the hierarchy of IPCC authorship.]

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My Comments: The IPCC's statements about likelihood are expressed as percentages, which imply that they are backed by statistical analysis but this is rarely true. In fact IPCC guidance notes say that they can be derived from statistical analysis or by canvassing expert opinion. Statistical analysis of scientific papers from such a skewed field of research don't mean much, but nor do expert opinions when we are not told who those people are, what they were asked and how they replied. It is also worth comparing these responses to those in Chapter 8 when single reviewers were able to convince IPCC authors to alter "likely" to "very likely" and vice versa. 9.4 Is the temperature data accurate?

[1-549 1 9 6 9 35] The records shown are not "observations" and they are not "temperatures". They are also not "globally averaged". They are a set of multiple averages, subtracted from an overall average, compiled from a vaying [sic] non-standardised set of maximum and minimum temperature measurements at varying weather sations [sic] and ship measurements. They were previously treated as "Mean Global Temperature anomaly" The uncertainties attached to each figure are very great, Individual temperature measurements are rarely accurate to better than one degree, so a claimed "trend" over 100 years of less than one degree has a very low level of statistical significance. [Vincent Gray, New Zealand] Response - Rejected - The comment does not reflect the scientific understanding. The errors in individual observations are not additive; we are also doing relative analysis that eliminates many of the concerns about individual errors. The reviewer obviously has a limited understanding of the associated error evaluation for analysis of large datasets. See Chapter 2 for more on the evaluation of these datasets. Or maybe even read a basic textbook. And ... [2-1106 2 28 42 28 52] The temperature records are likely flawed because the global average CRUTEM3 diverged from HadSST2 starting in 1980 after 130 years of similar values. Hadley Centre assumed the divergence was due to flaws in the monitoring of SSTs but another important factor is that the CRUTEM3 data did not agree with the corresponding data from national meteorological services (a difference of more than 10 degrees for some Russian stations at times) and the data for many observation stations ceased in the CRUTEM3 dataset in the late 1980s although was available from NMSs). Did the IPCC seek an independent audit of HadCRUT3 (of HadCRUT4) data prior to citing it? If not, why not? Surely any review of the associated paper would have been cursory unless the reviewer was able to obtain the data and replicate all the calculations. [John McLean, Australia] Response - Rejected. The assessment is charged with undertaking a holistic literature review. Not undertaking audits of each and every dataset which would be an impossible task with solely voluntary effort on the part of the (C)LAs. The assessment does not rest on the CRUTEM dataset - it is supported by numerous national, regional, and global analyses produced independently, by trends in other variables and by the global reanalyses products as made clear here and across the remaining sections of this Chapter and other Chapters of the report. The assertion that the divergence since 1980 is down to SST biases is stated as an unsupported strawman argument. To our knowledge such a statement has never been made by the UK Met Office.

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My comments: The final sentence of the second response by an IPCC is demonstrably incorrect. Reviewer John Kennedy, of the UK's Hadley Centre, says in comment 2-1253,

It's not true that measurement methods with 'smaller' biases were used after 1941. What happened was that there was a mix of measurement methods of differing sign so the overall bias was generally smaller and the individual systematic errors were harder to detect. Kennedy et al (2011a) shows ships in modern period with biases of order 1K. ...'

In the larger picture it is surprising that the IPCC has never audited the temperature data on which:

(a) it was established, (b) it bases its claims of warming (c) climate models that the IPCC cite rely (d) is fundamental to its "projected" temperatures.

If the temperature data is seriously flawed then it's game-over for the IPCC. The response tries to claim that "numerous national, regional and global analyses produced independently" support the assessment. In fact most of the data for these studies is sourced from a single repository in the United States, which is supplied with data from national meteorological services, just as the Climatic Research Unit is. 9.5 Deliberately forgetting the past?

[SPM-305 SPM 2 37 2 39]  The  statement  "many  changes  …..are  ….unprecedented  on   time  scales of decades to many hundreds of thousands of years is completely false. The same climatic changes that have occurred during the past century have occurred many, many times at all time scales (decades, centuries, millennia). Atmospheric and ocean temperature measurements, historical observations, isotope data from ice cores, glacial fluctuations, tree ring measurements, pollen changes, ocean sediments, and many other records of past climatic changes demonstrate many climate changes at all time scales (see peer-reviewed summary in Easterbrook, 2011, Evidence-based Climate Science, Elsevier Inc.). This is supposed to be a scientific document and such false statements have no place in a document like this. [Don Easterbrook, United States of America] Response - reject, statement is based on the comprehensive assessment given in chapter 5 of the WGI AR5. And ... [1-281 1 5 19 5 22] You seem here to be denying that there has been appreciable change in the average temperature of the earth for :"many centuries" How many is that? What about the "Little Ice Age" or the :Roman Warm Period?. [Vincent Gray, New Zealand] Response - Rejected - this is taken care of by the word "relatively"

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My comments: The IPCC seems to think that without the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide climate would be – and by extension, should be – stable and seems reluctant to admit that it varied prior to when it thinks greenhouse gas emissions started altering it. 9.6 The late inclusion of papers by IPCC Authors

[2-62 2 0 2] The chapter is supposed to be by all authors and a basic procedure in IPCC is that no-one should assess their own work. In section 2.3 this is blatantly ignored and the biases of one lead author (Martin Wild) are very apparent. The CLAs and other LAs should take ownership of this and other sections. [Kevin Trenberth, United States of America] Response - The revised section has been reviewed by expert CLAs, LAs and CAs to make sure that the section is balanced. And ... [2-1383 2 35 6 36 27] I have an uneasy feeling in this section. I see "Mears submitted" a few times. This appears problematic from this vantage point - a lead author, fully aware of the inside goings-on of the text, is able to submit a paper (or 2?) under the deadline before outsiders (such as this reviewer) can have a chance to do due diligence. Special care is needed not to over-promote a paper that will be allowed to have the "last" word in a document such as the IPCC. (This is not to say Mears-submitted might be inaccurate.) On the other hand, the IPCC process is problematic due to this basic fact - it is out of date as I type this because papers submitted after last July will be excluded. It's an unsolvable dilemma when the product is static rather than dynamic (i.e. web-based.) At times it probably feels like a fools errand. [John Christy, United States of America] Response - Noted. As the reviewer notes this is an inevitable issue in any assessment process. The reviewer had access, should they have requested, to a version of the paper lodged with TSU as per guidance. The section conclusion does not rest on the Mears et al. analysis and cites multiple papers including many lead or co-authored by the reviewer to reach its bottom line conclusion. The Mears et al analysis was instigated by RSS and in no sense was solicited or invited by IPCC. It was funded under US government grants. And ... [10-31 10 0] There is a new paper which looks at emergence of signal in observations "Emerging local warming signals in observational data" by Irina Mahlstein, Gabi Hegerl, and Susan Solomon that is accepted at GRL. It would be nice to when it would get mentioned. [Irina Mahlstein, Switzerland] Response - Accepted. Text revised.

My comments: Trenberth at least acknowledges that there are IPCC procedures for dealing with peer-reviewed papers written by IPCC authors, but Christy points out the matter of papers by such authors having the "final say".

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Mahlstein's comment illustrates the problem by recommending, and the authors accepting, a "new" paper written by her, a Contributing Author to that chapter, and Hegerl, a Lead Author to that chapter. Mahlstein's paper was published on 14 November 2012, when the end of the review period was 30 November 2012, giving the wider scientific community little opportunity to consider the paper and perhaps critique it. This matter is a valid concern because the "attribution" chapter of the IPCC Second Assessment Report (1994) relied heavily on a paper, written by a coordinating lead author of that chapter, some lead authors of the chapter and other people, which had been submitted at the last minute but not yet accepted for publication. The entire chapter was modified to accommodate the findings of that paper. (Former IPCC chairman Bert Bolin discusses this in his book "A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change") It's not difficult to see this paper as a desperate attempt to produce material to bolster the IPCC's claims. The irony is that the IPCC cited the paper and yet the paper cited the IPCC report when it was published about 12 months after the release of the IPCC report. The scientific community rejected the paper almost immediately, but it had served its purpose for the IPCC and perhaps prevented the organization from being disbanded. There is reference to the 1994 paper by IPCC authors in AR5 and the response is interesting.

[10-459 10 6 38 6 40] You must be aware that this statement from 2AR was false. It was a very late conclusion was inserted after the review of SOD and was based on an unpublished paper written by several authors of the 2AR "attribution" chapter (refer section 8.2.1 + endnotes, Bolin, "A History of the Science and Politics of Climate Change", Cambridge Press, 2007), what's more the paper was dismissed by the scientific community when it was finally published. [John McLean, Australia] Response - Rejected. The Santer et al conclusion has been supported by subsequent studies and neither the assessment of the SAR nor the Santer et al study has been dismissed by the scientific community.

9.7 The use of models that the IPCC admits are flawed

[9-75 9 1 200 4]. In effect, Chapter 9 failed to address two key questions, which must be addressed before one tries using the models for understanding present and future climate: (1) Do the models represent the physics of our terrestrial climate system correctly? (with the emphasis on "correctly") (2) Have the predictions made by these same (or slightly modified) models five, ten or fifteen years ago become true? These should be the questions to ask before one tries making any climate predictions and/or policy recommendations based on the models. I shall address these questions in paragraphs 5, 6, and 7, and 8, respectively. [Igor Khmelinskii, Portugal] Response - noted. This chapter concerns evaluation of climate models by quantitatively comparing model results to corresponding observations. Results presented in this chapter directly address the question of how well physically-based models of the climate system are able to reproduce observations. Evaluation of short- term climate predictions is covered in Chapter 11.

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And .. [9-684 9 17 15 17 37] This is a very interesting section. If I understand the point correctly, it is saying that the atmospheric component of a climate model is essentially a weather prediction model, and could be used as such if the correct initialization data were available. And, as a consequence, it has been shown that systematic errors in model behaviour develop quickly in the forecast interval. Now there has been a lot of discussion about the failure of observed temperatures to go up over the past 10-12 years, and longer in the tropical troposphere. The response of modelers has been to say that these intervals are too short to decide if there are any systematic errors in models. But here you seem to be saying that with regard to some key model processes, if they are going to go wrong, it will show up quickly. In other words, a discrepancy over a relatively short interval of time would be sufficient to indicate an error. So it would be helpful if we were given some kind of guidance as to what is the time scale necessary for testing the major hypotheses embedded in climate models. For example, how many years of observations on the tropical troposphere are necessary to test whether it is represented incorrectly in models? [Ross McKitrick, Canada] Response - Noted: It is well known that some, but not all, systematic model errors in the atmosphere evolve in the first few days of a forecast. As these fast-developing errors are usually linked to fast parametrised processes initial value techniques are useful to investigate their cause. The statement that modellers deny the existence of systematic errors is incorrect. The studies cited in this section are all concerned with systematic errors, so are many others throughout the chapter. The connection of such errors to a model's ability to simulate climate variability and trends is not well established and is an area of active research. And ... [10-35 10 0] (Chapter as a whole) Unless the papers cited in this chapter can be shown to accurately incorporate all climate forces they should be disregarded, in fact competent reviewers of these papers should have either rejected them or demanded comprehensive statements as to what the climate models simulated and how thoroughly. The IPCC does everyone a disservice by citing the output of papers based upon flawed models. (The repeated failure of predictions based on climate models is further evidence that the models are flawed and have no credibility.) [John McLean, Australia] Response: Rejected. The chapter considers known climate forcings and takes into account model biases in its assessment. And ... [10-73 10 3 3 3 13] Both these paragraphs are untrue. There have been no comparisons between the projections of climate models and future climate parameters. Indeed, the comparisons of scenarios with future behaviour, which are given in Figures 1.4, 1.5. 1.6, 1.7 and show that predictability is poor for temperature, N2O and Sea Level, and completely wrong for methane. Presumably, this paragraph is referring to consistency with past climate behaviour, which is no guide to the future and does not justify confidence in any of the model projections. This is particularly true for temperature, for the rather unreliable "Global "Mean Surface Temperature Anomaly" has hardly changed for the last ten years, which shows that for this period, the world is not currently warming, whatever the claimed increases in anthropogenic factors. This whole Chapter appears to believe that a proper VALDATION of model outcomes, which involves a comprehensive comparison with future climate behaviour, can be replaced by a system of DETECTION and ATTRIBUTION based entirely on the biased opinions of those who have been paid to produce them, and which is subject to a conflict of interest. These personal opinions are not scientific evidence [Vincent Gray, New Zealand]

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Response: Rejected. Evidence for the assessment is based on comparison between models and observations in order to identity to what extent expected patterns of anthropogenic and natural changes have emerged in observed changes. And ... [10-693 10 13 36 13 36] Nowhere in this report has it satisfactorily been demonstrated that climate models accurately simulate natural climate forces, which means that this sentence has no foundation and must be deleted. [John McLean, Australia] Response - Rejected. Figure 9.33b compares CMIP5 simulations of the past 1000 years with reconstructions. Natural forcings are dominant drivers through most of these simulations. Simulated variability is as high or higher than reconstructions on periods less than 1000 years. And ... [SPM-1391 SPM 9 3 9 5] To introduce  some  realism,  delete  “Development  of  climate  models  has resulted in more realism in the representation of many quantities and aspects of the climate system, including large-scale precipitation, Arctic sea ice, ocean heat content, extreme events, and the   climate   effects   of   stratospheric   ozone”,   and   insert   “Climate   models   are  inherently incapable of making reliable, very-long-term predictions of the future evolution of the complex, non-linear, chaotic climate object. Initial parameters are unknown to a sufficient resolution or precision. For example, models failed to predict the recent 16-year stasis in global warming. Major processes such as temperature feedbacks are unmeasurable and insufficiently   understood.”   Reason:   The   obsession   with   models   is   imprudent given their inescapable limitations. Models can be and have been tweaked to reproduce past climate changes but, on the whole, have been – and will probably always be – incapable of making reliable predictions for more than a week or two ahead. [Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, United Kingdom] Response - Reviewer fails to provide a substantive basis for his claims.

My comments: Review comment 9-75 gets to the heart of the matter by asking whether we should have any confidence in the output of climate models when there is serious doubt about their accuracy. Review comment 9-684 talks about systematic errors in models, how well the models were tested for these errors and whether anyone can be certain that the errors have been eliminated. Comment 10-35 says simply that if the models cannot be proven to be accurate then they should not be used and papers based on models should not be cited. The statement seems quite reasonable but the IPCC's basic argument is based on the output of climate models and without those models there would be no report and it logically follows that there would be no IPCC. It's no wonder that the response claimed that model bias is taken into account, but clearly isn't because models are either specifically biased towards CO2-driven warming or they are biased by the omission or downplaying of other important forcings.

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Comment 10-73 says that the performance record of climate models is poor and that despite what the IPCC might try to imply, no models have ever been validated. Comment 10-693 makes a good point but the answer is just vague hand-waving. Finally SPM-1391 points out that the IPCC's claims about the accuracy of models are deceitful and that climate models cannot handle the complex and chaotic nature climate system. It echoes the statement in Box 1.1 of Chapter 1 of the IPCC's 4AR (2007), which said, "A different type of uncertainty arises in systems that are either chaotic or not fully deterministic in nature and this also limits our ability to project all aspects of climate change". Chapter 1 of AR5 expressed similar thoughts when it says in FAQ 1.1 "[Uncertainties in climate projections] can also occur because representations of some known processes are as yet unrefined, and because some processes are not included in the models. There are fundamental limits to just how precisely annual temperatures can be projected, because of the chaotic nature of the climate system." These are six good comments that deserved, but didn't receive, substantial responses either in written form or via clear evidence that the IPCC shifted its thinking on the use of climate models. 9.8 Attributing cause

[2-1453 2 37 39 37 42] Figure 2.25. Interesting - my original recommendation was to use a simple average of UAH and RSS for this plot. Would it be possible to include ERA-I as a third column? I think this will give confidence (or at least enlightenment) that Reanalyses (at least ERA) is making a lot of progress. There really is no difference (well within error bars) between RSS and UAH LT. I do have a problem with the significance ascriptions. The authors are aware that significance means nothing in terms of causation, i.e. statistically significant trends over any time period can (and have) been due to natural variability alone. Given the overall bias of the IPCC (i.e. a strong sentiment among the carefully selected authors toward the belief that most of the warming in the past 50 years is human induced) the perception allowed to creep in here is that "significant" means "human caused". A simple statement that "significance does not imply a specific causation" would be very honest and helpful to the readers to help avoid what I see so often in IPCC sections of "jump to conclusion" statements. [John Christy, United States of America] Response - Noted. We included Era-Interim in this plot in the FOD and following reviewer comments dropped this in favour of UAH and RSS in the multi-panel configuration. We discussed further at Hobart and decided against changing this figure for a third time. Much though ERA_Interim would be interesting to add space restrictions preclude adding another panel here. The significance is clearly labelled as trend significance. The causes of any changes are the domain of Chapter 10 and we make no effort to ascribe causes here.

And ...

[10-248 10 4 8 4 21] Surely the reported changes would also be consistent with naturally-driven variations in temperature, so add this to the paragraph. [John McLean, Australia] Response: Rejected. The ES correctly summarises the overall assessment - where likelihood/confidence language is used to convey the strength of evidence.

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And on the same passage of text of the SOD and what followed ... [10-249 10 4 8 4 54] There is no evidence that these changes are caused by humans [Vincent Gray, New Zealand] Response: Rejected. The ES correctly summarises the overall assessment - where likelihood/confidence language is used to convey the strength of evidence.

My comments: The IPC author clearly copied the first response, with all its errors, to the second. The response also seems to think that models and hypotheses overrule empirical data about the influence of natural forces. 9.9 Other notable responses

[0-1970 10 62 51 62 54] It is a fallacy to regard the ENSO as "internal variability" because it involves ocean warmth, which is primarily drive by the sun, an external force, and the circulation that the ENSO state induces, be it Hadley Circulation or Walker Circulation, influences cloud cover which in turn influences the amount of solar irradiance (another external force!) striking the Earth's surface. [John McLean, Australia] Response: ENSO dynamics should (and to a large extent are) described by global climate models, which simulate ENSO variability as an internal process that exists without external forcing. So it is appropriate to regard ENSO as internal variability.

And ...

[2-89 2 3 0 3 0] The IPCC makes itself look foolish by treating atmospheric composition with greater priority than temperature. This is making the huge assumption that greenhouse gases have a major influence. Remove this section or move it to much later in the chapter. [John McLean, Australia] Response - Rejected - inconsistent with bulk of peer-reviewed literature.

And ...

[8-549 8 19 8 19 11] Who are you trying to fool? The warming influence of CO2 is logarithmic with concentration, which means a decreasing incremental warming it causes for each unit increase in concentration. Your graph, with an incomprehensible Y-axis scale for most readers, seems to be trying to claim the opposite. [John McLean, Australia] Response - Rejected: The CO2 concentration is increasing more than linearly therefore even with a logarithmic dependence the rate of change of RF is still increasing.

My comments: The first response is saying that the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is "internal variability" because that's how climate models treat it. Is this the best reason that the IPCC author has?

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The second response is a typical ploy of those with weak evidence. Discussing your intended culprit first then describe what the culprit is supposed to have done makes blaming the culprit far easier. This approach lacks integrity. The honest approach is to show what happened then argue why your suspect is likely to blame. The last response is most interesting. The IPCC author doesn't simply claim that RF (radiative forcing) is increasing with increased carbon dioxide but that the "rate of change" - presumably upwards - is increasing. This is in contradiction to the logarithmic relationship that shows forcing increasing at a decreasing rate. Compare the forcing shown in Figure 9-1, which was in the SOD and the subject of the comment, with Figure 9-2, which shows the forcing according to the well-recognised MODTRAN software package, which is based on well-recognised physics theories. (The coloured lines on Figure 9-2 indicate the supposed pre-industrial level of 270ppm, the concentration of about 2007 of 395ppm and a doubling of the pre-industrial level.) Figure 9-1 indicates that carbon dioxide forcing has increased by a factor of 10 since 1850. The Y-scale for this graph is logarithmic but in the final draft of chapter 8 it was altered to a linear scale and only if one reads closely does the text say that it is the increased forcing due to anthropogenic carbon dioxide. Over that time the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased from an estimated 320ppm to about 400ppm today, which according to figure 9-2 means an increase from about 257 watts per square metre to 259 watts per square metre. Figure 9-2 shows that the increase in carbon dioxide causes a progressively smaller increase in temperature with every unit increase in carbon dioxide (eg. steps of 1ppm or 5ppm). Figure 9-1 shows the opposite by claiming that each unit increase in carbon dioxide causes greater warming than the previous unit increase.

Figure 9-1. Copy of Figure 8.6(a) of the SOD of chapter 8 of SOD of WGI contrib. to IPCC 5AR. Note that the scale on the Y-axis is logarithmic. If it had been linear the CO2 graph line and the CH4 and N2O graph lines would all curve upward to the right. [The caption for 8.6(a) was "Radiative forcing from the major well-mixed greenhouse gases and groups of halocarbons from 1850 to 2011 (data currently from NASA GISS http://data.giss.nasa.gov/ modelforce/ghgases/)".]

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Figure 9-2. Theoretical carbon dioxide forcing according to Modtran software. (I have several copies of similar graphs but none with the creator's name, so I apologise.) 9.10 On "deniers" and "sceptics" The word "denier" appears four times and "deny" five times, and is sometimes used reasonably and sometimes abusively. Underlining has been added to the following extracts to highlight the use of the derogatory term "denier" (or however it might be spelt).

[0-169 0 0] ...It is as if there is some sense on the part of the writers that the more that is included, the better to make the case to the world (and perhaps to the skeptics, legitimate ones and denyers) that the climate system is well understood in all its minutiae, in support of actions that might be taken to mitigate. ... [Stephen E Schwartz, United States of America] (part comment only) [0-189 0 0] I would seriously question the appropriateness of any FAQ section in an objective technical submission. This smacks of distracting the reader into addressing "straw man" issues. I suspect the denier camp will jump all over this! [Stephen G Smith, United Kingdom] [2-69 2 0 9] Curiously, in several places, older literature is included without any good reason. This is material that was dealt with in AR4, for instance, and it is selectively brought back and is biased. It includes a lot of discredited papers by climate change deniers, for instance. It is evident in several places, especially 2.4.1.3. It is recommended that this be left dead and buried, and not resurrected. [Kevin Trenberth, United States of America]

[2-166 2 3 51 57] Doesn't this side step the past 10 years that denier press like to bring up? You should acknowledge the lack of trend over the past decade, and note that similar periods exist in the historical record, while still in a period of overall increase. [Karen Rosenlof, United States of America] [5-979 5 22 31 28 7] Section 5.3.5: While I like very much the focus on assessing new findings (since AR4) of this chapter in general, I suggest you add somewhere in this chapter a

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small discussion on things left out in AR4. In particular Mangini et al. (2005) was not discussed in AR4. Since IPCC risks to be blamed to have on purpose not discussed this, I suggest you do now correct for this omission and discuss somewhere these works (perhaps also some other works too, see list of references below, 2nd list). Since Mangini et al. (2005) is often cited by deniers, you could alternatively also do this in FAQ 5.3 (the one I have suggested to add). Cited References: ... [Andreas Fischlin, Switzerland]

The text string "skeptic" (as in "skeptic", "skeptics", "skepticism", "skeptical" etc.) appears 26 times in reviewers' comments or IPCC author responses, and in British English form as the text string "sceptic" 9 times. Some uses are acceptable, such as

"I am not sure this paragraph is the best way to ... convince a skeptical person..." (from 2-1105, Ileana Bladé, Spain)

but sometimes the use is more derogatory:

Citation alert: If the Cobb et al. reference is only "submitted" and not published in a peer-reviewed journal, then it cannot be used in a report of this nature. Skeptics will attack because of it. (5-1181, by Jay Curt Stager, United States of America) And ... Thus, we need to say that, at least for processes and the system on time scales of centuries, there is less and less likelihood that the sensitivity we have to deal with is going to go down or up much at all--and that there is just no indication that the skeptics with their claim of a very low sensitivity will be proven correct. (part 9-282, by Michael MacCracken, United States of America) And from a government ... I'd like to see this discussion of how recent analyses overcome the type of issues that might be seized upon by climate sceptics sharpened somewhat, as it is important to emphasise the robustness and scientific credibility of the work supporting rises in LSAT. A common sceptic tactic is to pick on a limited aspect of individual studies; it is the overall robustness that needs to be emphasised. ( 2-1109, by Government of Australia)

My comments: Note the words "attack" in the first extract and "seized upon" and "tactic" in the last extract. Civil scientific discussion seems to have disappeared, along with the notion that all scientists should be sceptical about any claims. I'm pleased to report that the IPCC authors did not resort to such terms when responding to reviewers' comments.

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Chapter 10 – Summaries and Conclusions 10.1 About the review comments (a) Government involvement Only 13.3% of the IPCC member countries (26 or 195) made any review comments on the Working Group I second order draft and six of these made a total of between 1 and 20 comments. Fifteen of these countries commented on less than half of the 17 documents, although 'chapter 0' wasn't a document but a place to make general comments. The 26 governments made a total of 7858 review comments, which is 25.3% of the total of 31021 review comments, although the United States of America, Australia and the European Union together accounted for 56.6% of all government comments. Several governments commented that, contrary the easily available HadCRUT4 temperature, warming had continued since 1998, at least one mentioned that the last decade was the warmest on record despite that being irrelevant to the question of whether warming has continued, and several complained that the Summary for Policymakers was difficult to understand. Personally I find it troubling that such governments formulate climate policies that impact millions of people. (b) Individual Reviewers A total of 794 individuals commented on the SOD of the Working Group I contribution, but 48.6% of them commented only on a single chapter and only 10% commented on more than 4 chapters. Over 60% of all reviewers made between 1 and 20 comments on the 17 documents and 21.5% made a single comment. Just 34 reviewers, 4.3% of the total, made more than 100 comments. Reviewers were from 49 countries but the USA was home to 210 reviewers, 26.4% of the total, and when combined with the next three countries in sequence of reviewer numbers it accounts for 415 of the 794 individuals. In total, 226 reviewers were authors of Working Group I for IPCC AR5 or AR4 or of both. These figures do not suggest a thorough review by a large number of reviewers. It looks like the text in the IPCC "procedures" document (see chapter 2) is more aspiration than reality, viz:

First, the best possible scientific and technical advice should be included so that the IPCC Reports represent the latest scientific, technical and socio-economic findings and are as comprehensive as possible. Secondly, a wide circulation process, ensuring representation of independent experts (i.e. experts not involved in the preparation of that particular chapter) from developing and developed countries and countries with economies in transition should aim to involve as many experts as possible in the IPCC process.

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(c) Responses by IPCC Authors It sometimes took just one reviewer's comment to have IPCC authors modify their likelihood expressions (eg. change 'very likely' to 'likely' and vice versa). This makes a mockery of the IPCC's description of how these decisions are to be made. On some occasions the responses by IPCC authors were either addressing a different statement to that made by the reviewer or would set up a strawman argument. One example is when I commented that reported anecdotal warming might have a natural cause and the response said or implied that another chapter of the report discusses a human influence. I didn't say that that the natural force did cause the warming but the response treated my statement as if it said that. The IPCC responses are sometimes dishonest, or at best inconsistent with the report. As shown here, one response claimed that climate model bias is taken into account when attributing cause. The failure of models to predict the recent sustained absence of warming shows that the models are seriously biased towards predicting warming or are biased by flawed mathematical descriptions of other processes. The models are clearly biased and chapter 10 certainly does not take the bias into full account. (d) Subsequent text modifications are not reviewed The responses to review comments made it clear that the executive summary of chapter 10 (on attribution) and parts of the SPM were substantially modified, and an important new text box was added to chapter 9. These are not minor changes or to be more precise not changes on minor issues and yet with the exception of the SPM no external review of the changes was undertaken before the modified documents were "accepted" and became the official IPCC version. (e) Author competence A large number of text modifications were made in response to reviewer comments. As noted above, the changes were sometimes substantial, and it must be said, were more likely to improve the political communication than to undermine it. That such a large number of changes were necessary after two drafts of the text (or three if we include an internal draft) speaks badly of the competence of IPCC authors. (f) Technical competence The IPCC seems to lack technological competence. Running a spellchecker (and maybe a grammar checker) across the text would have avoided reviewers having to also be proof-readers and editors. For example, ten reviewers wasted their time pointing out that the word "since" was missing from line 25 of page 4 of chapter 10 and IPCC authors wasted their time responding to these ten comments.

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The omission of end page numbers and end line numbers meant that comments were not sorted into correct order because blank fields appeared after the last of the numeric values. Better management of this data (forcing reviewers to provide the data or automatically entering default values) would have avoided out-of-sequence comments. (g) Futility of reviewing I can understand that people concerned about the integrity of science might wish to review drafts of IPCC assessment reports but it does seem to be a futile task except for those anxious to encourage the political distortion of science. While the text might be modified in response to the reviewers' comments those modifications are at the authors' discretion. Only the SPM is subjected to further review and its wording is negotiated before the document is approved by governments. Subsequent to this the various chapters are modified as necessary to align them with the SPM before the IPCC "accepts" them as the final and authoritative version. Under this scenario it matters little what reviewers say if their comments conflict with what the governments want the report to say. 10.2 About the IPCC The responses by IPCC authors reveal quite a lot about the IPCC. First, we learned that the IPCC has never audited the temperature data that is so fundamental to the establishment of the organisation, its claims about warming, the climate models on which it relies and the extent of its predicted temperature increases. Second, it was clear that the IPCC is not at all interested in serious criticism of its assessment reports because when reviewers make such comments the IPCC authors use any means, including straw-man arguments, mendacity and phony reasons, to dismiss them. Third, the IPCC is dismissive of any attempt to attribute climate and meteorological events to natural forces. If reviewers make comments about attribution when they comment on the chapters about observations (chapter 2 to 4), they were told that they should be raised in relation to chapter 10, but when they are raised in chapter 10 they are dismissed and emphasis is given to findings derived from climate models. My own comments about the European heatwave of 2003 referred to the meteorological explanations given chapter 3 of IPCC 4AR. This was dismissed in the review and findings from climate models were cited instead. This rejection of descriptions of natural causes lead me to believe that IPCC authors will look at nothing other than peer-reviewed papers, so without peer-reviewed scientific papers that explain and quantify the influence of natural forces on climate and weather those natural forces will be downplayed or ignored in IPCC assessment reports. This is a ridiculous twisting of science to make it fit a political agenda.

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10.3 The bigger picture In the bigger picture this IPCC assessment report, like other before it, shows signs of a split personality, one with a rational side and a delusional side. Chapters up to and including the evaluation of climate models are generally reasonable, although not without their faults. The problem lies with the "attribution" chapter and those that follow it, including the SPM. IPCC authors show evident signs of delusion and belief in a fantasy world. IPCC AR5, like every previous report, clearly states that climate models have a number of flaws. In AR5 this was also illustrated very clearly by a Figure that showed the temperature anomalies predicted by models for the period 1998 to 2012 were well above the anomalies derived from observational data. Despite this, the authors of the attribution chapter seem to think that climate models are 100% accurate, or as near as makes no difference. This delusion carries through to the subsequent chapters and to the Summary for Policymakers. Mind you it's not only a delusion about the accuracy of climate models but also a delusion that the output of models is "evidence". It would be an extreme coincidence if all 73 authors of chapter 10 of AR5 were simultaneously delusional, which leaves only the notion that it has been a deliberate attempt to deceive readers. It might be argued that the authors of subsequent chapters and the SPM might only be relying on the findings of chapter 10 because that is what they are instructed and expected to do, but relying on material they know to be false shows a lack of basic integrity. Maybe a better way to put it is that they have sold their scientific integrity in order to serve political masters. Ultimately the blame rests with those who established the IPCC and gave it a charter so narrow and locked its procedures into such a specific path that it can only produce one finding. Forcing it to use peer-reviewed papers when few, if any, papers fully described and quantified the influence natural forces on climate and weather ensured that natural forces would receive little attention in IPCC reports. Relying on peer-reviewed papers might sound impressive to politicians and the general public but only two or three people perform that review and climate science is often so complex that it is impossible for those performing the peer-reviewers to verify the findings. The IPCC really is a farce and it is disappointing that governments have not said so, but what can one expect when governments struggle to understand the science, the review comments show evidence of ignorance and they are pressured by UN agencies into accepting the IPCC's skewed view?

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APPENDIX – Supplementary Material

Main Text Supp Text Refs Figures & tables TOTAL

Chap 0 0 0 0 0 0 Chap 1 25 5 4 21 55 Chap 2 71 22 39 58 190 Chap 3 45 0 15 28 88 Chap 4 47 3 19 28 97 Chap 5 51 11 32 36 130 Chap 6 81 0 26 58 165 Chap 7 62 0 43 33 138 Chap 8 64 6 16 37 123 Chap 9 82 0 54 81 217 Chap 10 64 6 23 36 129 Chap 11 63 0 23 43 129 Chap 12 76 0 24 57 157 Chap 13 64 2 17 26 109 Chap 14 96 0 47 62 205

Tech Sum 64 0 0 34 98 SPM 16 0 0 9 25

TOTALS 955 55 382 638 2055 Av. of main 14 63.6 3.9 27.3 43.1 138.0 Av. of last 16 60.7 3.4 23.9 40.4 128.4

Table A1 – Number of pages for main text, supplementary text, references and Figures & tables

Document Governments Individuals WGI TSU Total

Chap 0 14 55 1 70 Chap 1 12 92 1 105 Chap 2 16 155 1 172 Chap 3 16 78 1 95 Chap 4 13 100 1 114 Chap 5 14 130 1 145 Chap 6 12 123 1 136 Chap 7 13 120 1 134 Chap 8 16 93 1 110 Chap 9 10 157 1 168 Chap 10 11 116 1 128 Chap 11 9 97 1 107 Chap 12 13 112 1 126 Chap 13 11 94 1 106 Chap 14 10 105 1 116

Tech Sum 16 72 0 88 SPM 21 115 0 136

Average 13.4 106.7 0.9 120.9

Table A2 - Number of reviewers who commented

57

Governments Individuals WGI TSU Total Chap 0 70 151 9 230 Chap 1 264 744 86 1094 Chap 2 574 2267 52 2893 Chap 3 405 774 54 1233 Chap 4 492 1434 58 1984 Chap 5 629 1643 30 2302 Chap 6 638 2041 75 2754 Chap 7 433 1647 30 2110 Chap 8 340 1161 21 1522 Chap 9 579 1786 98 2463 Chap 10 252 1849 68 2169 Chap 11 301 1026 55 1382 Chap 12 351 1033 122 1506 Chap 13 352 1192 68 1612 Chap 14 215 1139 218 1572

Tech Sum 554 780 0 1334 SPM 1409 1452 0 2861 Total 7858 22119 1044 31021

Average 462.2 1301.1 61.4 1824.8

Table A3 – Comments per chapter

Government Chapter 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

European Union 0 15 72 41 69 49 139 57 Govt of Australia 6 23 174 88 90 95 112 16 Govt of Benin 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Govt of Brazil 0 0 19 2 0 12 36 0 Govt of Canada 1 46 36 16 61 33 98 17 Govt of Chile 0 1 15 1 16 0 0 0 Govt of China 1 2 7 2 0 1 2 2 Govt of Denmark 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Govt of Finland 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Govt of France 3 34 26 18 7 74 5 2 Govt of Germany 41 15 3 8 6 6 51 55 Govt of Iceland 0 0 5 10 5 8 0 0 Govt of India 1 0 43 11 0 5 0 6 Govt of Japan 1 1 6 2 36 1 9 1 Govt of Kenya 0 0 0 0 5 0 0 0 Govt of Morocco 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Govt of Netherlands 0 0 3 1 0 0 0 0 Govt of New Zealand 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 Govt of NORWAY 1 32 19 9 5 8 30 10 Govt of Poland 1 0 0 18 2 44 0 31 Govt of Russian Federation 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 17 Govt of Spain 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 Govt of Sweden 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Govt of United Kingdom 9 4 12 6 6 12 14 8 Govt of Tanzania 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 Govt of United States of America 0 89 131 172 184 281 141 211

TOTALS 70 264 574 405 492 629 638 433

Table A4(a) – Number of comments by each government (chapters 0 to 7)

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Government

Chapter

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 TSum SPM

European Union 46 100 47 54 75 153 32 26 15

Govt of Australia 8 73 33 22 37 14 48 27 216

Govt of Benin 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 15

Govt of Brazil 1 0 0 0 0 10 0 0 0

Govt of Canada 21 19 19 9 73 1 14 68 148

Govt of Chile 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 1

Govt of China 2 1 3 0 2 0 0 3 10

Govt of Denmark 11 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 21

Govt of Finland 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 18

Govt of France 1 12 8 8 6 23 1 1 93

Govt of Germany 71 62 12 12 51 31 3 263 157

Govt of Iceland 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Govt of India 0 5 10 0 1 0 0 1 1

Govt of Japan 1 0 0 0 3 3 1 3 36

Govt of Kenya 0 0 0 0 0 7 0 5 3

Govt of Morocco 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 14

Govt of Netherlands 4 0 1 2 3 0 0 1 120

Govt of New Zealand 4 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 67

Govt of NORWAY 15 0 13 0 6 4 0 1 108

Govt of Poland 11 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Govt of Russian Federation 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Govt of Spain 1 43 0 0 0 0 3 1 13

Govt of Sweden 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 23

Govt of United Kingdom 8 6 3 4 6 2 7 102 197

Govt of Tanzania 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 0

Govt of United States of America 135 258 103 187 86 104 104 47 133

TOTALS 340 579 252 301 351 352 215 554 1409

Table A4(b) – Number of comments by each government (chapters 8 to 14, Technical Summary and Summary for Policymakers)

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Country TotComments Reviewers %TotCmts %Revs Com/Rev United States of America 5020 210 22.7 26.4 23.9 United Kingdom 4953 107 22.4 13.5 46.3 Germany 1146 50 5.2 6.3 22.9 China 516 48 2.3 6.0 10.8 Australia 1543 40 7.0 5.0 38.6 France 926 40 4.2 5.0 23.2 Japan 210 37 0.9 4.7 5.7 Switzerland 884 36 4.0 4.5 24.6 Canada 1909 27 8.6 3.4 70.7 Netherlands 788 25 3.6 3.1 31.5 Norway 552 18 2.5 2.3 30.7 Spain 500 18 2.3 2.3 27.8 Sweden 457 16 2.1 2.0 28.6 Finland 188 13 0.8 1.6 14.5 Italy 229 12 1.0 1.5 19.1 Belgium 336 11 1.5 1.4 30.5 India 256 10 1.2 1.3 25.6 New Zealand 372 10 1.7 1.3 37.2 Austria 212 5 1.0 0.6 42.4 Republic of Korea 35 5 0.2 0.6 7.0 Russian Federation 166 5 0.8 0.6 33.2 Brazil 78 4 0.4 0.5 19.5 Chile 52 4 0.2 0.5 13.0 Denmark 182 4 0.8 0.5 45.5 Ireland 33 3 0.1 0.4 11.0 Argentina 68 2 0.3 0.3 34.0 China 17 2 0.1 0.3 8.5 Israel 18 2 0.1 0.3 9.0 Nepal 37 2 0.2 0.3 18.5 Peru 41 2 0.2 0.3 20.5 Saudi Arabia 40 2 0.2 0.3 20.0 Singapore 35 2 0.2 0.3 17.5 South Africa 7 2 0.0 0.3 3.5 Taiwan 16 2 0.1 0.3 8.0 Thailand 20 2 0.1 0.3 10.0 Turkey 3 2 0.0 0.3 1.5 Venezuela 51 2 0.2 0.3 25.5 Benin 12 1 0.1 0.1 12.0 Colombia 3 1 0.0 0.1 3.0 Croatia 24 1 0.1 0.1 24.0 Greece 8 1 0.0 0.1 8.0 Hungary 68 1 0.3 0.1 68.0 Iran 17 1 0.1 0.1 17.0 Islamic Republic of Iran 1 1 0.0 0.1 1.0 Palestine 16 1 0.1 0.1 16.0 Portugal 24 1 0.1 0.1 24.0 Romania 25 1 0.1 0.1 25.0 Trinidad and Tobago 30 1 0.1 0.1 30.0 Ukraine 1 1 0.0 0.1 1.0

Table A5 – Number of individual reviewers and comments from each country

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Chap No Total Reviewers

Tot IPCC Auth

Chapter Author

Author other AR5

Chapters

Not AR5 but AR4

Author Other

Chap 0 55 10 0 7 2 46 Chap 1 92 28 1 18 9 65 Chap 2 155 43 12 21 10 112 Chap 3 78 29 4 14 11 49 Chap 4 100 24 6 8 10 76 Chap 5 130 40 10 16 14 90 Chap 6 123 38 17 11 10 85 Chap 7 120 32 10 16 6 88 Chap 8 93 29 7 15 7 64 Chap 9 157 66 17 32 17 91 Chap 10 116 49 15 23 11 67 Chap 11 97 49 12 30 7 48 Chap 12 112 57 16 25 16 55 Chap 13 94 33 9 12 12 61 Chap 14 105 30 8 15 7 75

Tech sum 72 23 0 18 5 49 SPM 115 39 9 18 12 76

Table A6 – Individual reviewer numbers for each chapter,

split into IPCC author groups and non-authors.

Chap No Tot IPCC Auth

Chapter Author

Author other AR5

Chapters

Not AR5 but AR4

Author Other

Chap 0 18.2 0.0 12.7 3.6 83.6 Chap 1 30.4 1.1 19.6 9.8 70.7 Chap 2 27.7 7.7 13.5 6.5 72.3 Chap 3 37.2 5.1 17.9 14.1 62.8 Chap 4 24.0 6.0 8.0 10.0 76.0 Chap 5 30.8 7.7 12.3 10.8 69.2 Chap 6 30.9 13.8 8.9 8.1 69.1 Chap 7 26.7 8.3 13.3 5.0 73.3 Chap 8 31.2 7.5 16.1 7.5 68.8 Chap 9 42.0 10.8 20.4 10.8 58.0 Chap 10 42.2 12.9 19.8 9.5 57.8 Chap 11 50.5 12.4 30.9 7.2 49.5 Chap 12 50.9 14.3 22.3 14.3 49.1 Chap 13 35.1 9.6 12.8 12.8 64.9 Chap 14 28.6 7.6 14.3 6.7 71.4

Tech sum 31.9 0.0 25.0 6.9 68.1 SPM 33.9 7.8 15.7 10.4 66.1

Table A7 – Data from Table A6 shown as percentage of total reviewers for each chapter

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Chap No Total Comments

Total IPCC Auth

Chapter Author

Author other AR5

Chapters

Not AR5 but AR4

Author Other

Chap 0 151 21 0 12 9 130 Chap 1 744 194 1 123 70 550 Chap 2 2267 948 320 439 189 1319 Chap 3 774 443 65 221 157 331 Chap 4 1434 466 275 123 68 968 Chap 5 1643 572 349 101 122 1071 Chap 6 2041 914 555 186 173 1127 Chap 7 1647 587 262 233 92 1060 Chap 8 1161 579 188 275 116 582 Chap 9 1786 597 195 239 163 1189 Chap 10 1849 1153 266 460 427 696 Chap 11 1026 651 182 429 40 375 Chap 12 1033 713 265 266 182 320 Chap 13 1192 536 188 190 158 656 Chap 14 1139 550 238 173 139 589

Tech Sum 780 273 0 233 40 507 SPM 1452 532 116 280 136 920

Table A8 – Total comments for each reviewer group for each chapter

Total IPCC Auth

Chapter Author

Author other AR5

Chapters

Not AR5 but AR4

Author Other

14.6 0.0 7.9 6.0 86.1 26.1 0.1 16.5 9.4 73.9 41.8 14.1 19.4 8.3 58.2 57.2 8.4 28.6 20.3 42.8 32.5 19.2 8.6 4.7 67.5 34.8 21.2 6.1 7.4 65.2 44.8 27.2 9.1 8.5 55.2 35.6 15.9 14.1 5.6 64.4 49.9 16.2 23.7 10.0 50.1 33.4 10.9 13.4 9.1 66.6 62.4 14.4 24.9 23.1 37.6 63.5 17.7 41.8 3.9 36.5 69.0 25.7 25.8 17.6 31.0 45.0 15.8 15.9 13.3 55.0 48.3 20.9 15.2 12.2 51.7 35.0 0.0 29.9 5.1 65.0 36.6 8.0 19.3 9.4 63.4

Table A9 – Data from Table A8 expressed as percentages for each chapter

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Section From page To page

Executive summary 3 5

Main text 6 72

References 73 111

Supplementary material 112 133

Tables 134 140

Figures 141 191

Figure A1 – Page-comment profile of chapter 2

63

Cover photo of a path in the woods by Paul Gillett, as posted to Wikimedia Commons, and licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.