Jessica Tierney
@leafwax
The @IPCC_CH report will be released in the early AM tonight. I helped author it, and tomorrow I'll tweet about some of the findings re:
#drought which was one of the things I worked on. In the meantime, it's worthwhile knowing a few things about the process
1/ IPCC authors like myself do not get paid! We volunteer. It's a three year commitment and it becomes a deep part of your life. Why do we do it? Because we care about making sure the world knows about what has happened and what will happen if we don't cut emissions.
2/ The text in the IPCC report went through two rounds of public peer review, during which time anyone (I mean anyone!) could read the draft and submit comments. The authors have to respond to *every* comment (there are thousands).
#accountability 3/ The IPCC report doesn't have "new" data. Everything in the report is already published in the scientific literature. The report is an "assessment", which means it synthesizes what is out there and decides how well we understand what has happened/will happen
4/ As you'll see tomorrow, the report has a lot of parts. Let's break them down. The meat of the report is made up of 12 chapters and an Atlas. Each chapter has a dozen or so main authors and a list of contributing authors. Let me explain the authorship thing...
5/ The Coordinating Lead Authors (listed first) do what their name implies, they coordinate the production of the chapter, take on a lot of extra admin-style work, and are ultimately responsible for meeting deadlines
6/ The Lead Authors (like me) do a lot of the writing and figure making. In some cases we are responsible for entire subsections within the chapter. We get help though from the Contributing Authors, who we might ask to draft up a paragraph or two about a specific topic
7/ Contributing Authors are not officially part of the IPCC process (drafting, reviewing, etc) but are folks in the community who are specialists and helped by contributing some text or sometimes a figure
8/ Back to the "parts". One step up from the full report is the Technical Summary, which is what it sounds like, a detailed summary of the full report.
9/ Two steps up from the full report is the Summary for Policymakers, which is probably what you will read tomorrow. This is an even more concise summary, and it has to be approved by governments line by line, which is what has been happening in the last two weeks.
10/ So in order of shortest to longest, it goes Summary for Policymakers -> Technical Summary -> Full Report. Don't be afraid to read stuff in the full report! There is good stuff that for brevity didn't make it to the top docs!
11/ Finally, because people are asking about impacts and mitigation, know that the report released tomorrow is just the Working Group I (WGI) report, "The Physical Science Basis". Impacts and mitigation are in WGII and WGIII respectively which are coming out next year
12/ Hope that helps explain things some! Tomorrow there will be a lot of science to digest. fin/