"Reuters:
Scientists and government delegates finally approved the last part of their 3,949-page report over the weekend...
Completing the politically sensitive "Summary for Policymakers" section, which 195 governments must approve by consensus, presented a particular challenge.
Each word of each sentence needed to be scrutinized and debated.
To help the effort, organisers displayed each sentence in yellow on a shared screen until it was approved, at which point it appeared in green.
If it was rejected, it turned blue – signaling a revision was needed. Disputes then had to be resolved in virtual breakout sessions.
"We spent sometimes hours on a footnote," said co-chair Valerie Masson-Delmotte, a climate scientist at the University of Paris-Saclay who described work on the report as a "marathon."
Warmist Prof. Andrew Dessler:
"The high profile part of the IPCC reports are the Summary for Policymakers (SPM).
These documents must be approved line-by-line by the member governments.
A sentence is only included if *every* gov't agrees with it." Dessler added:
"They want countries to unanimously agree on every sentence of the Summary for Policymakers because these documents serve as the starting point for climate negotiations."
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/hours-footnote-scientists-felt-joy-frustration-making-un-climate-report-2021-08-10/
234 scientists spent years working on report for free
Co-chair compares efforts to a “marathon”
Virtual decision-making posed new challenges
GENEVA, Aug 10 (Reuters)
– After spending hundreds of hours in virtual meetings to complete this week’s major U.N. climate report, scientists Piers Forster and Joeri Rogelj celebrated in a way their peers could not: by hugging.
Britain-based Forster had been weary of the isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic and invited his co-author to work alongside him in his Harrogate kitchen
as they worked with other scientists around the world to thrash out the final version of the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Being together for the last stretch of a three-year effort “made it more fun,” said Forster, a climate physicist at the University of Leeds.
“My neighbours must have thought us mad though, hearing “Thank you madam co-chair,” in response to questions from St Kitts, India, or the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, coming through at 4 a.m.”
When the more than 700 scientists and government delegates finally approved the last part of their 3,949-page report over the weekend, they all erupted into cheers – each separated in their own little frame, except for Forster and Rogelj.
This year’s landmark report, warning that the world is dangerously speeding toward runaway climate change, took years of painstaking effort to pull together.
Specialist scientists, all 234 of them working for free,
reviewed more than 14,000 scientific studies published since 2013 to draft the latest version of what has now become the established science on climate change,
before coming together – virtually – for two weeks of final checks and negotiations.
While scientists praised the inclusion of colleagues from 65 countries across the globe, some said the resulting time-zone challenges were bad for their sleep.
“We could not find any time slot that wasn’t two o’clock in the morning for somebody,” said Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
“I’m a night owl, but I’m not that much of one,” he joked.
Completing the politically sensitive “Summary for Policymakers” section, which 195 governments must approve by consensus, presented a particular challenge.
... When negotiations start, no country can say they don't agree with the science.
They've already agreed to it.
... It's possible to add a sentence to the SPM that one or two countries object to if they add a footnote stating that objection.
The threat of a footnote is usually enough to get the recalcitrant countries onboard. — Andrew Dessler (@AndrewDessler) August 11, 2021
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The following is an excerpt from the new 2018 best-selling book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.
Prof. John Brignell: “The creation of the UN IPCC was a cataclysmic event in the history of science. Here was a purely political body posing as a scientific institution. Through the power of patronage, it rapidly attracted acolytes. ‘Peer review’ soon rapidly evolved from the old style refereeing to a much more sinister imposition of The Censorship.”
Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning environmental physical chemist from Japan, is another UN IPCC scientist who has turned his back on the UN climate panel. Kiminori declared that global warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…. When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.”
UN IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri admitted the IPCC is an arm of world governments and serves at their “beck and call.”
“We are an intergovernmental body and we do what the governments of the world want us to do,” Pachauri told the Guardian in 2013.
In 2012, a year before the report came out, former UN climate chief Yvo de Boer announced that the next IPCC report “is going to scare the wits out of everyone.”
He added, “I’m confident those scientific findings will create new political momentum.”