Thursday, October 03, 2013

Bummer: Shutdown might hinder policy-neutral IPCC members from talking to politicians about "formulating what new policies or approaches that might be dictated" by the IPCC report

Policy: Washington's climate -- hot rhetoric, cold comfort as a few good employees struggle on -- Wednesday, October 2, 2013 -- www.eenews.net
The shutdown comes at an especially inconvenient time for climate research; a number of scientists with NOAA were co-authors of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which was released in full Monday (ClimateWire, Oct. 1).

Since the shutdown, these experts are no longer available to help interpret the 2,000-page document for journalists or policymakers.

"The scientists involved in that, by and large, will not be helpful to the administration or to Congress in terms of formulating what new policies or approaches that might be dictated by that information ... which is very critical," said Steven Murawski, formerly the chief scientist of the National Marine Fisheries Service under NOAA and now a professor of marine science at the University of South Florida. "Without scientific information, this becomes an exercise in belief rather than fact."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

As they say, "every cloud....."

Kevin Lohse said...

""Without scientific information, this becomes an exercise in belief rather than fact."
That is the best one-line description of AR5 I've seen so far.