Mitigation: WGIII SPM

I have been surfing through the IPCC WGIII (Mitigation) summary for policy makers, and I'm not impressed. In my opinion, it's a terrible piece of technical writing, unlikely to be of much use to anyone, least of all policy makers.


Why am I so critical, when it has lots of colorful graphs, boxes and tables, and clearly represents a lot of hard work? In the first place, I can't imagine an audience. I certainly can't imagine a senior government official, congressman, or even congressional staffer reading through these 24 pages, or learning much if they did.


The central organizing principle is a set of alternate "scenarios," but you won't find much discussion of them here - for that you need to go "somewhere else." In fact that's true of almost everything in the summary. Curious as to what a US$/tCO2-eq is? Better look "somewhere else."

I have never met a policymaker who was willing to wade through this kind of technical gobbledegook. My guess is than even Congressional staffers would glaze over by Table SPM.2.

The relevant questions a real policy maker might have are not addressed. There are expressions of "agreement" and "confidence," but no discussion of the underlying assumptions. There is blather about top down and bottom up studies, but no discussion of what that might mean.

Predictions about how the climate system will respond to forcings are founded on physics, and so have at least some credibility. Predictions about how economic and political systems will behave are ****much**** more uncertain. Nobody mentions that. Nobody really knows what the economic impact of a cap-and-trade system would be and nobody has a clue as to how it could be enforced internationally.

Cost expressed in US$/tCO2-eq are worthless. What does that mean per gallon of gas?

Nobody, so far as I can tell, is preparing the public for stuff they will ultimately need to sign up for. That may not be the purpose of the WGIII SPM, but don't see any other value to it either.

It's vague where it should be specific (detailed mitigation methods), specific where it should be silent (implausible and widely varying estimates of economic impacts), and maddeningly jargon filled. Are the authors really unaware that a useful summary needs to be mainly self-contained?

Did I mention that I didn't like it?

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