Be prepared for a lot of sullenly cranky Greenies in a week or so:
On Sept. 27, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release its fifth report on global warming. Earlier IPCC assessments — the most recent was in 2007 — were the foundation for reams of alarmist reporting. For example, after a 2009 update, the Washington Post ran a story headlined “New Analysis Brings Dire Forecast,” reporting that a predicted 6.3-degree Fahrenheit increase in world temperatures “is nearly double what scientists and world policymakers have identified as the upper limit of warming the world can afford in order to avert catastrophic climate change.”
That was then. Now, the new IPCC document will “dial back the alarm,” in the words of a Wall Street Journal preview. According to the Journal, the report will state that “the temperature rise we can expect as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide is lower than the IPCC thought in 2007.” The computer forecasts used to produce those forecasts, it turns out, were wrong.
Said Greenies will, of course, come up with new and exciting ways to declare that the sky is falling. The problem is that if it turns out that we’re going back to the slightly warmer and wetter conditions* (or resetting to them) of the early Medieval period then there isn’t actually a problem. A bit more warmth and a bit more humidity and a bit more carbon = happy ecosystem. Continue reading IPCC to walk back Global Warming Doomsday Scenarios next week?