The IPCC and the challenge of ex post policy evaluation

Abstract

The IPCC started at a time when climate policy was an aspiration for the future. The research assessed in the early IPCC reports was necessarily about potential climate policies, always stylized and often optimized. The IPCC has continued on this path, even though there is now a considerable literature studying actual climate policy, in all its infuriating detail, warts and all. Four case studies suggest that the IPCC, in its current form, will not be able to successfully switch from ex ante to ex post policy evaluation. This transition is key as AR7 will most likely have to confront the failure to meet the 1.5K target. The four cases are as follows. (1) The scenarios first build and later endorsed by the IPCC all project a peaceful future with steady if not rapid economic growth everywhere, more closely resembling political manifestos than facts on the ground. (2) Successive IPCC reports have studiously avoided discussing the voluminous literature suggesting that political targets for greenhouse gas emission reduction are far from optimal, although a central part of that work was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2018. (3) IPCC AR5 found it impossible to acknowledge that the international climate policy negotiations from COP1 (Berlin) to COP19 (Warsaw) were bound to fail, just months before the radical overhaul at COP20 (Lima) proved that point. (4) IPCC AR6 by and large omitted the nascent literature on \textit{ex post} climate policy evaluation. Together, these cases suggest that the IPCC finds self-criticism difficult and is too close to policy makers to criticize past and current policy mistakes. One solution would be to move control over the IPCC to the national authorities on research and higher education.