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Making use of the IPCC's powerful communication tool

Nature Climate Change volume 6, pages 637–638 (2016)Cite this article

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To the Editor —

Based on the study of Barkemeyer et al.1 some commentators2 and the IPCC leadership3 have concluded that the top-level documents of the IPCC are harder to understand than a paper by Albert Einstein. Although meant as a metaphor, we disagree with the general conclusion that these documents stand out in terms of low readability as important evidence was ignored and text analyses in general tend to be surprisingly trivial.

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Figure 1: FRE scores for the SPMs of the three IPCC Working Group contributions (WGI, WGII and WGIII) to AR5 and the Synthesis Report (SYR), compared with the IPCC headline statements of the WGI and SYR SPMs.

References

  1. Barkemeyer, R., Dessai, S., Monge-Sanz, B., Renzi, B. G. & Napolitano, G. Nature Clim. Change, 6, 311–316 (2016).

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  2. Tollefson, J. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature.2015.18543 (2015).

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  4. IPCC Headline Statements from the Summary for Policymakers (WGI Technical Support Unit, 2014); http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/uploads/WG1AR5_Headlines.pdf

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  7. Report of the Conference of the Parties on its Nineteenth Session, Held in Warsaw from 11 to 23 November 2013 FCCC/CP/2013/10/Add.1 (UNFCCC, 2013).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Climate and Environmental Physics, Physics Institute, University of Bern, Sidlerstrasse 5, Bern, 3012, Switzerland

    Thomas F. Stocker & Gian-Kasper Plattner

  2. Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Falkenplatz 16, Bern, 3012, Switzerland

    Thomas F. Stocker

  3. Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Zürcherstrasse 111, Birmensdorf, 8903, Switzerland

    Gian-Kasper Plattner

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  1. Thomas F. Stocker
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  2. Gian-Kasper Plattner
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Stocker, T., Plattner, GK. Making use of the IPCC's powerful communication tool. Nature Clim Change 6, 637–638 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3010

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