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Published online 14 November 2007 | Nature 450, 327 (2007) | doi:10.1038/450327b
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Panel negotiates climate 'synthesis report'
IPCC summarizes science data in 100 pages for policy-makers.
Bathing in the still-warm glow of receiving the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is meeting in Valencia, Spain, this week to negotiate the summation of its report on global warming.
The IPCC has issued three scientific reports in the past year, and its fourth 'synthesis report' is scheduled for release on Saturday.
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It is surprising that this whole four-volume Report has appeared only on the web, and that, so far, there is no printed document. This means that very few have actually read any of it The whole document is struggling with the fact that the "globe" has not been "warming" for eight years, and shows every signs of being about to cool. The term "global warming" has been abandoned, in favour of "climate change", where any climate event can be blamed on the non-existent warming without people noticing it. This Report says that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal". Note; it is the "climate system" that is referred to, not the global temperature, or the climate itself, which are not warming. The use of "unequivocal" contradicts a statement in the First Volume which says “unequivocal attribution would require controlled experimentation with the climate system. Since that is not possible, in practice attribution of anthropogenic climate change is understood to mean demonstration that a detected change is ‘consistent with the estimated responses to the given combination of anthropogenic and natural forcing’ and ‘not consistent with alternative, physically plausible explanations of recent climate change that exclude important elements of the given combination of forcings�. The exercise as a whole has failed to show that increases in greenhouse gases are harming th climate and proper examination of the evidence shows that all of it is scientifically unsound.
Research on isotopic composition of ancient soils has shown that atmospheric levels of CO2 have fluctuated significantly over hundreds of millions of years. At times in the geological past the CO2 levels were many times higher than at present and at times lower. What caused these large fluctuations? In Pleistocene times glaciers reached as far south as Ohio and Illinois, then retreated-- long before man had any impact on atmospheric CO2. If I were looking to see what effects man is having on the climate, I would compare how climate changed before man came onto the scene with how climate changed after man came on the scene. I would not look only at the latter, which seems to be the case in many studies! Global climate change, variations in atmospheric CO2, and sea level rises and falls are all well-documented geological phenomenon that pre-date mankind's existence by hundreds of millions of years. Let's keep an open mind and continue the research!