Full IPCC report will be released shortly after SPM on Monday 30 September

Many people (including myself) have criticised IPCC in the past for releasing the full IPCC report only months after the SPM. This was a very unfortunate procedure because claims in the SPM have to be backed up in the full report but nobody was able to check the report when the SPM came out. This week on twitter Ed Hawkins (amongst others) suggested that this time IPCC will release the full (but still unedited) WG1 report shortly after the SPM. I asked the press officers of IPCC if they could confirm this and they promptly did.

Werani Zabuli wrote me:

Dear Marcel

Thanks for your email.

During the 17th meeting of the Executive Committee (EXCOM) of the IPCC that was held in Geneva, Switzerland on 27 February 2013, the EXCOM decided that ” as well as the approved Summaries for Policy Makers (SPM) that will be released immediately after the approval sessions, the unedited version of the chapters and Technical Summaries as prepared for the final government distribution (FGD) together with the FGD version of the SPM will be released on the first or second working day following the approval session. They will be accompanied by the document accepted by the Plenary that contains the list of changes to be made to the chapters for consistency with the approved SPM, and with an explanation/disclaimer of their status.” See conclusion from that meeting here http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/excom/ExComXVII.pdf under item 4.

This information will be included in a media advisory on the arrangements for the launch of WG I contribution to AR5 ( scheduled for 27 September 2013) which we hope to issue later this week.

I hope this helps. Feel free to contact us should you need anything else.

Best regards,

Werani Zabula

In a second email she made it even more explicit: “Just to add that in the case of Working Group I, the accepted final draft of the full Working Group I report will be released on Monday 30 September 2013.”

This is a great improvement in comparison with AR4 when the full report was released months after the SPM and without even a notification (see post at Climate Audit). Congrats to the IPCC for changing this. Hopefully IPCC will also quickly release all the expert reviewers comments. After AR4 Steve McIntyre had to go after this and only after issueing an FOI at NOAA IPCC released all the comments and the lead author responses (see here and here).