The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change published its latest mammoth report last week, and the
effort marks an improvement over the IPCC's last such effort in 2007.
That may not be saying much, but on climate change intellectual progress
of any sort is worth commending.
The
IPCC's "Fifth Assessment Report," or AR5, is generating the usual
alarmist headlines: "Impacts on All Continents, Worse to Come" was
typical. That's partly a function of what the IPCC frontloads into the
28-page "summary for policymakers," the only portion of the report that
most politicians or journalists ever bother reading, and that is sexed
up for mass media consumption.
So it's
worth diving deeper into the report, where a much more cautious picture
of the state of climate science comes into view. Gone are some of the
false alarmist claims from the last report, such as the forecast that
the Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035 or that hurricanes are
becoming more intense. "Current data sets," the report admits, "indicate
no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency
over the past century." Recall the false claims of climate cause and
storm effect last year after Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines.
album titled “A Day In The Life of the EPA Administrator” that shows
what McCarthy does on a typical day, including the fact that she flies
home nearly every weekend to spend time with her family.