GEOG Seminar 2/23: The Collapse of the IPCC’s Climate Change Mitigation Assessment Reporting, Giovanni Baiocchi

Join us for our weekly seminar this Thursday, February 23rd from 3:45-5pm via Zoom! GEOG Professor Giovanni Baiocchi will be presenting "The climate crisis we are not talking about: the collapse of the IPCC’s climate change mitigation assessment reporting — Implications for our practice."

Abstract:

The credibility of the IPCC mitigation report is being undermined by the collapse of the journal's peer review process unable to cope with a deluge of poor quality papers and by the perverse incentives for the report’ authors to publish their own material at the expense of others. Material that has no place in the scientific literature features in the report for everyone to see. Some of the material included is so egregious that its inclusion cannot be attributed to an honest difference in interpretation or academic judgment. The IPCC still maintains that it does not conduct original research and claims that the assessment undergoes a rigorous process of reviewing. The quality problem affects also the attempt to bypass the problem of quantity by including review papers that make use of computer-assisted approaches. These attempts appear futile and misleading as limited useful information can be derived from them because of the unacknowledged instability of the algorithm used and the low quality of the input data. By feeding flawed information that fits the authors’ pre-existing believes into the algorithms and choosing the results that best confirm them, the result in the creation of echo-chambers where authors are unable to recognize the existence of different views and admit the existence of a quality problem.

Speaker Bio:

Prof. Baiocchi's research mainly focuses on environmental sustainability and climate change mitigation. He is interested in research in areas with strong interdisciplinary links between sustainability, geography (Human, GIS, and remote sensing), and the social sciences, such as global emissions, food security, poverty, mobility, and diets.

Zoom Info: Please reach out to hlshao@umd.edu for Zoom meeting information.