The IPCC

The Distortion

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put out it's latest assessment of climate change in 2007, a massive assessment of the state of the climate. The well-funded forces of the status quo have attacked the report's hundreds of findings, cherry-picking a few small conclusions and trying to smear the entire report.

The Truth

Out of the many hundreds of conclusions in the report, one minor mistake slipped through the vetting process. The Himalayan glaciers will not disappear by 2035, as one secondary section of the report stated. The glaciers are melting, but the date of final disappearance is further away than 2035. The fix for this: delete two sentences on page 493 of the Working Group 2 report. It changes *nothing* about the overall conclusions of the report.

And that's pretty much it. The deniers have tried to cast doubt on a number of other conclusions, but all of them have turned out to be accurate. In short, the rigorous process of the IPCC resulted in literally hundreds and hundreds of correct conclusions, and one minor one that wasn't.

But the attacks aren't about good science or about getting at the truth. They are smear campaigns, pure and simple, desperate attempts to distract us from the reality of climate change and the urgency of doing something about it.

A great rundown of this can be found here:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/ipcc-errors-facts-and-spin/