It could not have escaped anybody’s notice that the summary of the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report (AR5) is due out at the end of this week in Stockholm on 27th September. The hype around this release is building up and by all the usual suspects. And the prime suspect is Nature. It has released a special issue on the 25 years of the IPCC. But nearly all these usual outlets are all in a state of denial or cover-up or both.
The IPCC faces a dilemma. Should they mention that while carbon dioxide keeps increasing global temperatures have been at a standstill and their fantasised link between fossil fuel combustion and global temperature seems to be broken. Not likely since the usual suspects have far too much invested in this hypothesis. Should they just ignore that global warming has stalled for the last 17 years and lose even more of their fast evaporating credibility. Or should they mention it and then enter into an orgy of contortion to show that their models are still valid because the missing heat has been swallowed by the Monsters of the Deep. It looks like they will choose the latter since the contortions have already begun.
The simple but inconvenient truth is that the IPCC has misled and wasted the world’s resources for 25 years.
Nature Special Issue
OUTLOOK FOR EARTH: A NATURE SPECIAL ISSUE ON THE IPCC
This Nature special issue explores the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – an international body of hundreds of scientists and policy experts that regularly assesses the state of knowledge about how climate is changing, what impacts that will have, and how nations can mitigate the problem. A graphical introduction chronicles the history of the IPCC and how climate science has evolved over the past 25 years. One news feature examines the latest research on rising sea levels and another profiles Ottmar Edenhofer, a leader of the IPCC’s upcoming report on mitigation. In a Commentary, Elliot Diringer proposes that individual actions by nations to tackle the causes of climate change can set the stage for international action. And K. John Holmes looks at the history of large-scale environmental assessments.
Image credit: Carl De Torres
FEATURES
As the IPCC finalizes its next big climate-science assessment, Nature looks at the past and future of the planet’s watchdog.
A graphical tour through the history of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the science that underlies it.
Researchers struggle to project how fast, how high and how far the oceans will rise.
Getting hundreds of experts to agree is never easy. Ottmar Edenhofer takes a firm, philosophical approach to the task.
COMMENT
Home-made national approaches can be effective for climate-change mitigation if countries agree on rules and build trust, says Elliot Diringer.
The first large-scale environmental surveys, carried out on the US arid lands, hold scientific lessons for policy-making still relevant today, explains K. John Holmes.
Tags: global warming, IPCC, IPCC hype, Nature
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