774 ABC Melbourne

I was just interviewed on 774 ABC Melbourne radio. They wanted to know about the IPCC Report being "censored". So, I explained that the governments get to edit their own executive summary - the Summary for Policy Makers - from a draft provided by the scientists but they can't touch the underlying report or the Technical Summary, which is a second executive summary. Also the SPM has to be fully referenced to the underlying report so it is a question of picking and choosing what to emphasize rather than censoring. The main changes in the SPM are a downplaying of "international cooperation" in favour of an emphasis on "sustainability, justice, and equity" in the framing statements and the deletion of graphs and discussion of how emissions break down on a regional or development level basis in any way. This apparently reduces the onus on development countries to take actions equivalent to those of the developed world and focuses more on the distributional issues rather than contributions to the total problem. Though emissions per capita are much lower in developing countries they now emit the majority of total emissions and are catching up in terms of their contribution to the accumulated greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.