Landmark climate change report leaked online

Landmark climate change report leaked online



Draft of IPCC's fifth assessment, due to be published in September 2013, leaked online by climate sceptic Alec Rawls




The BoA coal-burning
power plant, which went into operation in August 2012 near Grevenbroich,
Germany. Photograph: Juergen Schwarz/Getty Images



The draft of a major global warming report by the UN's climate science panel has been leaked online.
The fifth assessment report (AR5) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is not due to be published in full until September 2013, was uploaded onto a website called Stop Green Suicide on Thursday and has since been mirrored elsewhere on the internet.
The
IPCC, which confirmed the draft is genuine, said in a statement: "The
IPCC regrets this unauthorized posting which interferes with the process
of assessment and review. We will continue not to comment on the
contents of draft reports, as they are works in progress."
A little-known US-based climate sceptic called Alec Rawls, who had been accepted by the IPCC to be one of the report's 800 expert reviewers, admitted to leaking the document. In a statement posted online,
he sought to justify the leak: "The addition of one single sentence
[discussing the influence of cosmic rays on the earth's climate] demands
the release of the whole. That sentence is an astounding bit of
honesty, a killing admission that completely undercuts the main premise
and the main conclusion of the full report, revealing the fundamental
dishonesty of the whole."
Climate sceptics have heralded the
sentence – which they interpret as meaning that cosmic rays could have a
greater warming influence on the planet than mankind's emissions – as
"game-changing".
The isolation by climate sceptics of one sentence
in the 14-chapter draft report was described as "completely ridiculous"
by one of the report's lead authors. Prof Steve Sherwood, a director
of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South
Wales, told ABC Radio in Australia:
"You could go and read those paragraphs yourself and the summary of it
and see that we conclude exactly the opposite, that this cosmic ray
effect that the paragraph is discussing appears to be negligible … It's a
pretty severe case of [cherry-picking], because even the sentence
doesn't say what [climate sceptics] say and certainly if you look at the
context, we're really saying the opposite."
The leaked draft
"summary for policymakers" contains a statement that appears to
contradict the climate sceptics' interpretation.
It says: "There
is consistent evidence from observations of a net energy uptake of the
earth system due to an imbalance in the energy budget. It is virtually
certain that this is caused by human activities, primarily by the
increase in CO2 concentrations. There is very high confidence that
natural forcing contributes only a small fraction to this imbalance."
By "virtually certain", the scientists say they mean they are now 99% sure that man's emissions are responsible. By comparison, in the IPCC's last report, published in 2007,
the scientists said they had a "very high confidence" – 90% sure –
humans were principally responsible for causing the planet to warm.
Richard Betts, a climate scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre and an AR5 lead author, tweeted
that the report is still a draft and could well change: "Worth pointing
out that the wording in the leaked IPCC WG1 [working group 1, which
examines the "physical science basis" of climate change] draft chapters
may still change in the final versions, following review comments."
Bob
Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research
Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of
Economics and Political Science, said that Rawls appeared to have broken
the confidentiality agreement signed by reviewers: "As a registered
reviewer of the IPCC report, I condemn the decision by a climate change
sceptic to violate the confidentiality of the review process. The review
of the IPCC report is being carried out in line with the principles of
peer review which operate throughout academic science, including an
expectation of high standards of ethical behaviour by reviewers. It is
disappointing, if not surprising, that climate change sceptics have been
unable to meet these high standards of ethical behaviour."
The
IPCC, which publishes a detailed synthesis of the latest climate science
every seven years to help guide policy makers, has experienced leaks
before. In 2000, the third assessment report was leaked to the New York Times, while the fourth assessment report was published in 2006 by the US government a year ahead of its official publication.
Prof
Bill McGuire, Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at
University College London and contributing author on the recent IPCC
report on climate change and extreme events, said that sceptics' reading
of the draft was incorrect: "Alex Rawls' interpretation of what IPCC5
says is quite simply wrong. In fact, while temperatures have been
ramping up in recent decades, solar activity has been pretty subdued, so
any interaction with cosmic rays is clearly having minimal – if any –
effects. IPCC AR5 reiterates what we can be absolutely certain of: that
contemporary climate change is not a natural process, but the
consequence of human activities."
Prof Piers Forster, Professor of
Climate Change at the University of Leeds, said: "Although this may
seem like a 'leak', the draft IPCC reports are not kept secret and the
review process is open. The rationale in not disseminating the findings
until the final version is complete, is to try and iron out all the
errors and inconsistencies which might be inadvertently included.
Personally, I would be happy if the whole IPCC process were even more
open and public, and I think we as scientists need to explore how we can
best match the development of measured critical arguments with those of
the Twitter generation."


source:-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/dec/14/ipcc-climate-change-report-leaked-online