John Zillman - Climate Change

Climate Change

While Zillman has contributed to the IPCC, unlike others on the IPCC, he has made public comments that indicate his respect for the IPCC process and has defended it from attack:

The IPCC is not, as... many appear to have been led to believe, some ideologically committed group of scientists with a particular position or perspective on the science which they seek to promote. Rather it is a highly transparent process, supervised by governments, which enables the contemporary state of knowledge of climate change as it emerges from the peer-reviewed published literature to be summarised and assessed by a representative group of the internationally acknowledged experts in the field with their summary assessment subject to one of the most exhaustive processes of peer review and revision that I believe has ever occurred in the international scientific community. The IPCC doesn't have a construct, a model, an ideology or a pre-determined position. It is simply an inter-governmentally coordinated scientific assessment mechanism for producing in summary form, for use by policymakers, a synthesis of the state of the science as it appears in the literature with particular attention to the identification of points on which there is a high level of scientific agreement in the literature and those on which there is little agreement or little confidence in what is agreed.

Of current climate change he goes on to say:

I believe the models are now remarkably good at simulating most of the essential climate forming processes in the atmosphere and the ocean and even the behaviour of the total climate system at the global scale. And, though I would not have said so a decade ago, I now believe, as does the IPCC, that there is no more than a one in three chance that the observed global warming over the past century is entirely natural in origin.

He has said of the IPCC Second Assessment Report:

In order to avoid the risk of having the IPCC reports made vulnerable to charged of political influence, the IPCC Chairman and the WG Co-chairmen were meticulous in insisting that the final decision on whether to accept particular review comments should reside with chapter Lead Authors. This was at variance with the normal role of journal editorial boards and led to suggestions that some Lead Authors ignored valid critical comments or failed to adequately reflect dissenting views when revising their text .