IPCC scores climate change own goal as report leak goes global

By Ian Wishart

The UN IPCC thought it could stage a public relations coup by leaking a final draft copy of its latest climate change report to “friendly” journalists, hoping to score positive coverage prior to the report’s official release later this week.

Instead, tonight the IPCC has scored a brutal own goal, as the report gets leaked to the public for the first time, via climate website WattsUpWithThat and ClimateDepot.

IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri should have realised the light at the end of the tunnel was a train – he is, after all, a railway engineer by trade. Instead, tonight’s public leak completes a fortnight of horrors in which the UN agency has been blindsided by bad news.

It turned out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that some of the journalists the report had been leaked to were no longer so friendly when they actually read it, and discovered that all the global warming stories they’d written for the past decade had been massively overhyped.

The IPCC’s AR5 draft, it transpires, contains admissions that the climate computer models are wrong, that the planet has warmed less than thought and that there has been no actual warming so far this century.

So the ‘friendly’ journalists, rather than stick the knife in themselves, passed the report on to not so friendly journalists who’ve spent the past two weeks rubbing the IPCC’s nose in it.

The test for members of the public is to compare this final draft from a fortnight ago with the final sanitised version being released at the end of this week.