John Whitman
As a non-involved observer, it appears to me that your proposal to create a “Climate Consortium Academica” to replace IPCC makes very good sense.
Even before the Laframboise book was published, the IPCC had become largely irrelevant, although many of those involved have not quite realized this yet.
An AR5 report would, by definition, also be irrelevant and should not be published, as you suggest.
If one looks for the principal causes for the IPCC’s failure, it is clear that one of the most important causes was the agenda-driven “consensus process”, which forcibly led to the introduction of bias in the “science”.
Any new group that fills the vacuum left by the IPCC must guard against the creation of such a process by openly accepting and including all scientifically legitimate studies and data, even if they are in direct conflict with the “mainstream” view.
The objective and brief of this new group should not be to find evidence to support the premise of potentially alarming human-induced climate change, as it was for IPCC, but to find out what makes our planet’s climate behave the way that it does. There should be no myopic fixation on anthropogenic causes for climate change at the exclusion of natural climate changes.
The group should obviously not be set up under the UN, but should rather be funded separately by the governments of the leading nations; a possibility would be the OECD nations plus Brazil, China, India and Russia.
It should not be seen as a principal task of this group to provide pertinent climate information to policy makers, but rather to provide such information to the general public. The group should not be involved in making policy suggestions, but simply in reporting the facts.
I would agree with your point that there “should be no leadership or senior positions in this group filled by former IPCC personnel”, and would add that those climate scientists, which have shown themselves to be advocates of a cause rather than objective scientists, should also not be involved in the new group.
There should obviously be no ties to either the fossil fuel industry or to environmental lobby groups, such as WWF, Greenpeace, Alliance for Climate Protection, etc.
Organizations, such as the RS or the NAS, whose political leaderships have already expressed open support for the IPCC position, should also be excluded from direct involvement.
I would add that this group should ensure that all publicly funded climate science be completely open to scrutiny and that the group itself should be audited by a group of independent auditors, whose job it would be to ensure that the problems that happened with the IPCC do not recur.
The devil will be in the detail, but your concept could be a good framework IMO.
Let’s see if any other posters here have some good ideas.
Max