"IPCC draft report in FULL": Embargo Broken

With the release on Friday of the IPCC Policymakers summary comes news that Junkscience.com have released their 2006 copy of the second draft of the full IPCC report that the recent summary is based upon. There are some serious megabytes of report available to download.

Officially we still have to wait another few months for the full and final edited report. It is a surprise therefore to see an embargo on earlier drafts broken by Junkscience.

Below is their argument for this release.

As everyone is probably by now aware, Friday, February 2, 2007 marks the release of the IPCC's political document: Assessment Report 4, Summary for Policymakers. The media seem to be operating under the misapprehension this is equivalent to the release of IPCC Working Group I Contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis -- this is regrettably neither true nor even close to the truth.

Bizarrely, the actual report will be retained for another three months to facilitate editing -- to suit the summary! IPCC procedures state that: Changes (other than grammatical or minor editorial changes) made after acceptance by the Working Group or the Panel shall be those necessary to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policymakers or the Overview Chapter (Appendix A to the Principles Governing IPCC Work, p4/15) -- this is surely unacceptable and would not be tolerated in virtually any other field (witness the media frenzy because language was allegedly altered in some US climate reports).

Under the circumstances we feel we have no choice but to publicly release the second-order draft report documents so that everyone has at least the chance to compare the summary statements with the underlying documentation. It should not be necessary for us to break embargo and post raw drafts for you to verify a summary of publicly funded documentation (tax payers around the world have paid billions of dollars for this effort -- you own it and you should be able to access it).

Reluctantly then, here is the link to our archive copy of the second-order draft of IPCC Working Group I Contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. The second-order draft was distributed in 2006, 5 years into what has so far been a 6 year process and these copies were archived last May.

We would be interested to know what other bloggers think of this break of the embargo if that is what it actually is. One could argue that this post only fuels the flames with what little puff this blog has but surely that is what blogs are for. I hope no messengers are injured.

Thanks to Kate Sheppard (see previous post) for the hat-tip.