IPCC 5th report on global warming draft leaked online, evidence stronger - National Green Living | Examiner.com
DECEMBER 14, 2012
BY: ANNE SECCOMBE
"...
The agent of the Leak is a rather colorful Climate Contrarian named Alec Rawls, who essentially
claimed, on the basis of a single sentence in the draft, that the entire edifice of climate science is about to collapse. - In his interpretation, the group putting the report together, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is about to acknowledge the validity of a longstanding fringe theory: that cosmic rays have a huge influence on the earth’s climate.
The lead
author of the chapter from which the sentence in question was plucked, is Professor Steve Sherwood, the director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW. ABC News in Australia contacted Steve directly to get his response to the blogger's interpretation of the information. Here is what HE had to say:
"I'm sure you could go and read those paragraphs yourself and the summary of it and see that we Conclude Exactly the Opposite - that this cosmic ray effect that the paragraph is discussing appears to be negligible,"
he told Mark Colvin of the ABC's PM show.
"What it shows is that we looked at this. We look at everything.
"The IPCC has a very comprehensive process where we try to look at all the influences on climate and so we looked at this one."
Professor Sherwood and other leading scientists in the field of climate science are of the Consensus that the body of data we have available today
has effectively disproved the hypothesis that sunspots have a greater effect on global warming than does anthropogenic, or in other words human, activity.
"There have been a couple of papers suggesting that solar forcing affects climate through cosmic rays, cloud interactions, but most of the literature on this shows that doesn't actually work," he said.
"Even the sentence Doesn't say what they say and certainly if you look at the context, we're really saying the Opposite."
The entire interview is available to listen to here. Draft IPCC report leaked - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)