IPCC Accused of Cooling on Warming

Climate agency accused of cooling on global warming as new report lowers predicted temperature increase
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/0...report-lowers-predicted-temperature-increase/

As it prepares to present its first report in six years to the world’s governments, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has lowered the range of predicted global warming by half a degree celsius, leading to accusations of a climb-down from earlier, more dire forecasts.

The subtle drop, which suggests a doubling of atmospheric carbon would increase mean global temperatures by between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees celsius, rather than the earlier range of between 2 and 4.5 degrees, is included in a confidential summary for policymakers obtained by the National Post.

There is a broad agreement among countries, derived largely from the IPCC, that warming must be kept lower than 2 degrees in order to avert the most serious consequences. This latest range is the first to suggest that threshold might not be crossed.

The adjusted prediction follows a more drastic backtracking by the British Met Office, which this year lowered by 20% its previous prediction of how much hotter the coming few years will be than the long-term average since 1971. Both reflect efforts by climate scientists to reconcile the predictions of computer models with the observed so-called “pause” in global warming, which apparently stalled in 1998 and has yet to resume. This unexplained trend has been a headache for policymakers, many of whom came to the climate file during the era of clear-eyed alarmism driven largely by Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth.

With a major global meeting next week in Stockholm, at which the IPCC’s final report is to be released and questions debated by government negotiators, and with other geoplitical issues crowding climate off the agenda, this minor adjustment could cause big problems.

Matt Ridley, a scientist and journalist who is also a member of the British House of Lords, wrote in a Wall Street Journal essay on the weekend that the IPCC “dials back the alarm” with a “clear” downward adjustment of its predictions.

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It is amusing that the IPCC and the AGW alarmists used 1971 as the base-line for temperature change. 1971 was one of the coolest years in a period where everyone was squawking that global cooling was going to trigger catastrophe to mankind.