The inconvenient truth

After all the publicity that the recently released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summary of its upcoming report on how man is causing global warming, you'd think that the sky is falling. However, in it's most recent editorial, National Review Online has actually done a little research and comparison with the last such report released by the IPCC in 2001. NRO's take on it is quite a bit different than what the media frenzy this past week would have you believe.

The shock, however, is that the latest summary contains very little that was not in the IPCC’s last report, in 2001. Moreover, what is new represents a pullback from the gloomier claims of 2001. Notwithstanding the authors’ bold assertion of 95-percent confidence that human activity influences global warming, it appears from this short summary of the full 1,400-page report — which, inexplicably, the IPCC won’t release until May — that there has been only slight progress over the past five years in refining our climate models and resolving key uncertainties acknowledged in the last report.

Gone from the latest summary is the infamous “hockey stick” of the 2001 report. This was a graphic purporting to show that the planet is warmer today than at any time in the last thousand years, a demonstration which required erasing the inconvenient medieval warm period and the little ice age. The new IPCC report has also reduced its estimate of the human influence on warming by one-third (though this change was not flagged for the media, so few if any news accounts took notice of it). That reduction is one reason the IPCC narrowed the range of predicted future warming, and lowered the new midpoint — i.e., the most likely prediction of temperature increase — by a half degree, from 3.5 degrees Celsius in 2001 to 3 degrees in this report. The new assessment also cuts in half the range of predicted sea-level rise over the next century. Now the maximum prediction is about 17 inches, as compared with the 20 to 30 feet Al Gore dramatizes in his horror film. (Which truths are inconvenient now?) There are murmurs from the green warriors that the new report is a disappointment, and no wonder.

Interesting that the IPCC released the summary so far ahead of releasing the actual report. Call me cynical, but methinks that by releasing the summary with such Chicken Little drama, the IPCC is hoping that no one will actually pay attention to what the report says. The IPCC has achieved its desired effect, which is to put politics in front of science in an attempt to get politicians to make a knee-jerk, shallow-minded reaction in their never-ending quest to appease the voting masses.