The Australian reports:
THE recent pause in average global surface temperature rises made lifting confidence in the extent of the human contribution to climate change “incomprehensible”, a leading US climate scientist has said.
Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology, yesterday published her analysis of a leaked IPCC draft report that has sparked an international furore.
The leaked draft said it was “extremely likely” that human influence on climate caused more than half of the increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010.
The draft report said the world would continue to warm catastrophically unless there was drastic action to curb greenhouse gases.
Britain’s Mail on Sunday said the draft report showed climate models, and the IPCC, had significantly overestimated the rate of global warming.
Australian climate scientists said the IPCC report had not yet been finalised.
But they said the revised warming figure of 0.12C a decade in the draft IPCC report was within the range quoted in the 2007 IPCC report of between 0.1C and 0.16C…
Professor Curry said she believed there were inconsistencies in the draft report.
“If there are substantial changes in a conclusion in the AR5 (2013 report) relative to a confident conclusion in the AR4 (2007 report) then the confidence level should not increase and should probably drop, since the science clearly is not settled and is in a state of flux,” Professor Curry said.
“An increase in confidence in the attribution statement, in view of the recent pause and the lower confidence level in some of the supporting findings, is incomprehensible to me.
“Further, the projections of 21st century changes remain overconfident.”
It’s called ‘spin’