Pielke Jr. –A Takeover of the IPCC – Watts Up With That?

Charles Rotter

Roger Pielke Jr.’s “A Takeover of the IPCC” offers a timely post-mortem on what’s left of scientific rigor in the world’s most influential climate assessment body, of which Pielke Jr. has long been a supporter. The article chronicles not just a change in personnel at the IPCC, but a seismic shift in methodology and purpose—a transformation best described as a hostile takeover by advocates of “Extreme Event Attribution” (EEA). The implications for public policy, scientific integrity, and even the basic credibility of climate science are staggering, and long overdue for public scrutiny.

Pielke is unambiguous from the opening lines:

“The IPCC’s longstanding framework for detection and attribution looks DOA in AR7”.

The gravestone image—marking the death of the IPCC’s “Detection and Attribution Framework, 1988–2025”—sets the tone. What we are witnessing is the burial, not of a bureaucratic process, but of one of the last vestiges of disciplined scientific skepticism inside the IPCC.

He explains,

“The author list for its Chapter 3—Changes in regional climate and extremes, and their causes—suggests strongly that the IPCC will be shifting from its longstanding focus on detection and attribution (D&A) of extreme events to a focus on ‘extreme event attribution’ (EEA)”.

This isn’t an arcane distinction. The traditional D&A framework involved the slow, often frustrating, but necessary work of looking for actual changes in the statistics of weather over many decades, and then trying to assign causes—usually with a healthy dose of uncertainty and humility about what could or could not be claimed.

Here, the IPCC’s previous D&A approach was

“scientifically rigorous, consistent with the IPCC’s definition of climate change, and treats extreme events in the same manner as other phenomena, like global temperatures and sea level rise.”

In contrast, Pielke states,

“The EEA approach is scientifically problematic, inconsistent with the IPCC’s findings on extreme weather, and is explicitly grounded in climate advocacy”.

In other words, we are trading disciplined science for press releases, advocacy, and, more insidiously, ammunition for climate litigation.

Pielke takes care to document the makeup of the new IPCC author list for Chapter 3.

“The chapter’s author list shows that it is stacked with people who focus on extreme event attribution—far out of proportion to their presence in the field. With the help of Google Scholar and ChatGPT I created the table below, which shows that 9 of the chapter’s 20 authors focus their research on extreme event attribution. Two of the three coordinating lead authors focus on EEA. Few of the authors, if any, have expertise in the IPCC’s conventional framework for detection and attribution, and so have no publications on either detection or attribution”.

The table spells this out visually: only a minority of the authors have any background in the original detection and attribution methodology. Instead, there’s a glut of “attributionists”—scientists whose careers are based not on understanding long-term climate shifts, but on drawing direct lines from today’s weather headlines to anthropogenic climate change. This is not “science as a conversation,” it’s science as a megaphone.

Pielke provides a textbook example with the recent coverage of flooding in Pakistan.

“World Weather Attribution (WWA) in the media (6 Aug 2025): ‘Every tenth of a degree of warming will lead to heavier monsoon rainfall, highlighting why a rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is so urgent.’ The WWA analysis (not peer-reviewed, issued as a press release) claimed: ‘Historical trends associated with global warming in observational datasets show the 30-day maximum rainfall over the study region is now approximately 22% more intense . . . heavy rainfall events such as this one are expected to become more frequent and intense.’”

But as Pielke points out, this narrative falls apart under actual scientific scrutiny. A new peer-reviewed study, published July 9, 2025, concluded: “‘[U]nderstanding how climate change affects monsoon regions in South Asia is not straightforward, contrary to what some media commentators suggested when reporting the Pakistan floods in 2022.’” Even more damning, their projections indicate “a non-significant reduction by approximately 5% of the ensemble mean rainfall has been found.” And a 2022 study on flood incidence? “Annual maximum flows exhibited negative trends at 15 (10 significant) stations while positive trends were shown at 7 (2 significant) between 1981 and 2016 . . . Counter to common belief, the most profound and decreasing pattern of flows was observed in summer”.

These claims are, as Pielke notes, “impossible to reconcile.” Is Pakistan’s flooding getting worse? Is it tied to climate change at all? Is rainfall going up or down? Are emissions reductions relevant to monsoon behavior? The science—when you look past the headlines and advocacy—simply doesn’t support the sweeping certainty promoted by extreme event attributionists.

He notes that media outlets have become complicit in this shift, echoing EEA talking points without any critical scrutiny. The New York Times, for example, reports, “Once a Source of Life and Renewal, Monsoon Brings Death to Pakistan . . . climate change has brought a catastrophic new normal to the country.” Pielke retorts, “In reality, there is no ‘new normal.’ Pakistan has long been one of the most flood prone and flood impacted nations on the planet”. Table 1 backs this up, listing deadly floods going back decades—a grim but factual reminder that disasters are a feature of history, not a “new” byproduct of fossil fuels.

What’s really happening is that “extreme events have become a political football. Climate advocacy has emphasized connecting extreme events with climate change, promoting the idea that ‘every tenth of degree’ of global temperature increase is associated with more extreme events and more disasters. If only we reduce emissions, the argument goes, we can also modulate extreme weather. In this logic, every extreme event becomes about energy use, and not about exposure, vulnerability, and the local decisions that have seen disaster deaths drop to their lowest in human history. EEA has been central to such advocacy”.

This is a sleight of hand: instead of improving resilience, strengthening infrastructure, or investing in risk reduction—the things that actually save lives—policy is redirected into the dead end of emission controls and carbon accounting. EEA, according to Pielke, is now “central to such advocacy,” and the takeover of the IPCC chapter ensures that this will be the party line for years to come.

Perhaps the most important takeaway is that this transformation is not merely a “scientific debate.” It represents the replacement of scientific skepticism with groupthink and advocacy, all dressed up as expertise. “Scientific assessment can be challenging in the best of circumstances. When an assessment is taken over to serve politics it ceases to be an assessment and turns into something else”.

Pielke’s article, in short, is a wakeup call. The so-called “settled science” is more unsettled than ever, and the very structures meant to provide honest assessment are being repurposed for advocacy. The cost, inevitably, will be paid in public trust, misallocated resources, and a continued failure to address the real drivers of disaster risk.

There’s an old saying in science: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The new IPCC, sadly, seems content to settle for extraordinary press releases. The public deserves better. It’s time to ask, loudly, whose interests are really being served by this shift—and to demand a return to genuine scientific skepticism before the last shreds of credibility are gone for good.

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