The Courier reports:
AUSTRALIAN scientists have rejected claims a multi-national climate change body is set to revise down its previous warnings about the rate of global warming.
The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is preparing to hand down the first part of a major report on the updated science of global warming in Stockholm next week.
But a series of apparent leaks has sparked media speculation the IPCC’s highly-anticipated assessment could contain an admission it overstated rising temperatures.
It’s a claim that’s rattled Australian scientists, who say such a finding is hard to believe given it contradicts decades of data and the draft version of the report hasn’t even been finalised yet.
In particular, they’re furious at suggestions the IPCC will admit it got its numbers wrong and that over the past 60 years the world has been warming at half the rate stated in its previous 2007 report.
“That is complete fiction,” Professor David Karoly, a review editor of the IPCC report at the University of Melbourne, told AAP on Monday.
He said the observed global average warming of surface air temperature over the last 60 years was 0.12 degrees per decade – almost identical to the 0.13 value reported in the IPCC report of 2007.