(01.09.2015)
The bottom line is that this is a week of naked political horse trading that goes on behind closed doors. Journalists are not allowed to witness what takes place, which is why we’ve been looking at official IPCC photos here. This is what they permit us to see.
It’s only after the diplomats have haggled over this Summary – paragraph by paragraph – that the final version gets officially released at a press conference.
The world is then told that science has spoken. But what’s just happened has nothing to do with science. Scientific truth is not determined in the dead of night by UN-level negotiations. On what planet would such an approach make scientific sense?
But the bad news doesn’t stop there. There’s actually a step in the IPCC process in which the original, lengthy report gets amended so that it conforms to the politically-negotiated Summary. I am not making this up.