According to a number of scientific critics, the scientific consensus represented by the [International Panel on Climate Change] is a very conservative consensus. IPCC's reports, they say, often underestimate the severity of global warming, in a way that may actually confuse policymakers (or worse). The IPCC, one scientific group charged last year, has a tendency to "err on the side of least drama." And now, in a new study just out in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, another group of researchers echoes that point. In scientific parlance, they charge that the IPCC is focused on avoiding what are called "type 1" errors-claiming something is happening when it really is not (a "false positive")-rather than on avoiding "type 2" errors-not claiming something is happening when it really is (a "false negative").
The consequence is that we do not always hear directly from the IPCC about how bad things could be.Yep. The consequence is that the delayers-those people with political clout who accept the scientific consensus about global warming but are too chickenshit to take action to reduce its impacts-have been aided in their procrastination by the IPCC's striving not to appear alarmist in the five assessments it has issued over the past 24 years. Grim as the latest 116-page report officially released in Copenhagen Sunday is, and strong as the warnings in it are, it still gives delayers room to hem and haw and whine about how moving too quickly will ruin the economy. Still pretending that the environment and economy are two separate entities.
The report's bottom line? The carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide that the industrial age has poured into the atmosphere is now at its highest levels in at least 800,000 years, hundreds of millennia before modern humans emerged. The greenhouse gas burden is warming the planet's atmosphere and oceans and could in a worst-case scenario, if unchecked, increase the average global temperature 4.6° Celsius (8.3° Fahrenheit) by the turn of the century. The damage from such an increase would be, in the language of the IPCC report, "severe, widespread, and irreversible."
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