A media storm in the world risk society: enacting scientific authority in the IPCC controversy (2009–10)

Abstract

The reports on ‘errors’ in the IPCC assessment reports on climate change caused a media storm in the winter of 2009–10. At the time Maarten Hajer was, as he still is, Director of Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, which was responsible for one of the mistakes. The PBL was subsequently asked by the Dutch parliament to investigate the likelihood of there being more mistakes in the IPCC reports. In this article he reflects on the uses of deliberative theories of governance in handling this crisis in the authority of science.

Keywords:

• science–policy interface
• IPCC
• climate change
• assessment
• deliberative governance
• authority
• PBL

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the intellectual stimulus of the researchers at PBL working on the project described, most notably the editors of the study, Leo Meyer and Arthur Petersen. A first version of this paper was presented as the keynote lecture at the Sixth Annual IPA Conference in Cardiff (23–25 June 2011). I should like to thank Patsy Healey who acted as respondent for her initial reflections.

Notes

1. Ironically, the error came to light through the work of a journalist, Tomas van Heste. Van Heste, a graduate of the UvA's STS programme, had simply run a Google search on ‘the Netherlands’ in the IPCC's fourth assessment report and this was his first ‘hit’. He thought: ‘This cannot be true’ and suddenly he had a scoop that made it to the global media (Tomas van Heste, personal communication).