Mr Notz, you have two weeks of negotiations with government representatives from all over the world behind you, who may not all have been ready to accept the findings on accelerated climate change as science puts it.

Who prevailed?

Joachim Müller-Jung

Editor in the features section, responsible for the “Nature and Science” section.

  • Follow I follow

The aim of this negotiation process is to jointly develop formulations that reflect the state of the art in a correct and balanced manner.

Overall, I am very happy with the end result.

The statements we make are extremely clear in the end result.

For example, we can now say with certainty that every region of our planet is now demonstrably affected by man-made climate change.

The basic statements of the previous IPCC reports have in some cases been significantly refined.

As a newcomer to this process, how did you perceive the discussion with the government representatives?

The discussions were sometimes very intense, so that, for example, individual words were fought for hour after hour.

It was not always easy to find formulations that retained the precise, non-negotiable scientific basis but that could still be accepted by everyone.

How close were you to despair?

Sometimes I was pretty close personally.

But it was impressive to see that at the end we were able to present a summary of our report, which all countries could agree with.

This is absolutely essential for the significance of the IPCC report in the political decision-making process.

What was the detail of the disruption attempts?

The internals from the negotiations are confidential.

Were individual formulations possibly falsified by the political interventions?

No, scientifically everything that is now in the summary is of course correct.

Otherwise we authors would never have agreed to this text.

Only the wording has been partially adapted.

How often has the term 'Paris climate targets' been used?

That wasn't a central issue for our work.

Our job within the IPCC is not to address political goals.

In the way we are formulating things now, the Paris goals may play a part, but they are not explicitly mentioned in the end.

In its more than thirty-year history, the IPCC has repeatedly been reproached on the political side for being instrumentalized as an instrument of an ideology that exaggerates climate change, whereas for many scientists the acceleration of climate change by the IPCC was assessed too cautiously. Has the Council nevertheless remained true to its line?

In such allegations there is often a lack of understanding of what we are doing in this IPCC process: We have been examining the scientific literature since the last assessment report, i.e. the past seven years, and the evaluation of these shows how likely or unlikely certain statements are. Especially when the scientific literature contradicts each other on some points, we make it very clear that we can only make such statements with medium confidence, for example. I would say if you are attacked from both extremes, you might be doing most of the right things after all.