Articles Tagged "IPCC Fifth Assessment Report"
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Saturday, February 2nd 2013, 2:10 PM EST
The Earth has been getting warmer -- but how much of that heat is due to greenhouse gas emissions and how much is due to natural causes?
A leaked report by a United Nations’ group dedicated to climate studies says that heat from the sun may play a larger role than previously thought.
“[Results] do suggest the possibility of a much larger impact of solar variations on the stratosphere than previously thought, and some studies have suggested that this may lead to significant regional impacts on climate,” reads a draft copy of a major, upcoming report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The man who leaked the report, StopGreenSuicide blogger Alec Rawls, told FoxNews.com that the U.N.’s statements on solar activity were his main motivation for leaking the document.
“The public needs to know now how the main premises and conclusions of the IPCC story line have been undercut by the IPCC itself,” Rawls wrote on his website in December, when he first leaked the report.
Rawls blames the U.N. for burying its point about the effect of the sun in Chapter 11 of the report.
“Even after the IPCC acknowledges extensive evidence for ... solar forcing beyond what they included in their models, they still make no attempt to account for this omission in their predictions. ... It's insane,” he told FoxNews.com.
Some skeptical climatologists say that the statement in the U.N. draft report is important, but not game-changing.
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Thursday, October 11th 2012, 10:39 AM EDT
AS THE world's elite global warming experts begin poring over the drafts of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report this week, one leading scientist doesn't believe the process should be happening at all.
''I think it will be less successful than the last assessment, and I think it will be blander - I'm disappointed in what I've seen so far,'' said Kevin Trenberth, the head of the climate analysis section at the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research.
Professor Trenberth's misgivings are not based on doubts about the strength of the science underpinning human-induced climate change, but on frustration with the bureaucratic nature of the IPCC.
Dozens of Australian scientists are among hundreds of international experts who started reviewing the IPCC's fifth summary report this week, with the final version to be published next September. The previous report, released in 2007, declared global warming ''unequivocal'' and said it was ''very likely'' to be being driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases.
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Wednesday, October 10th 2012, 4:39 AM EDT
Background
The authors write that "the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) has devised an innovative experimental design to assess the predictability and prediction skill on decadal time scales of state-of-the-art climate models, in support of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5th Assessment Report," citing Taylor et al. (2012). To date, however, they say that decadal predictions from different CMIP5 models "have not been evaluated and compared using the same evaluation matrix," a problem which they resolve for seven of the models with their new study.
What was done
Kim et al. assessed the CMIP5 decadal hindcast-forecast simulations of seven state-of-the-art ocean-atmosphere coupled models for situations where "each decadal prediction consists of simulations over a 10-year period each of which are initialized every five years from climate states of 1960/1961 to 2005/2006."
What was learned
In regard to problems they uncovered with the models via this methodology, the three US researchers report that "most of the models overestimate trends," whereby they "predict less warming or even cooling in the earlier decades compared to observations and too much warming in recent decades." They also state that "low prediction skill is found over the equatorial and North Pacific Ocean," and that "the predictive skill for the Pacific Decadal Oscillation index is relatively low for the entire period."
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