Source:Suspicious0bservers
In an article titled “Is the IPCC Government Approval Process Broken?”, Robert N. Stavins, who is the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government, Director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, stated the following regarding the IPCC’s “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM) document that condenses more than 2,000 pages of text from 15 chapters into an SPM document of 33 pages: “I was surprised by the degree to which governments felt free to recommend and sometimes insist on detailed changes to the SPM text on purely political, as opposed to scientific bases. The general motivations for government revisions – from most (but not all) participating delegations – appeared to be quite clear in the plenary sessions. These motivations were made explicit in the “contact groups,” which met behind closed doors in small groups with the lead authors on particularly challenging sections of the SPM. In these contact groups, government representatives worked to suppress text that might jeopardize their negotiating stances in international negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).”