Extracts from Ofcom Complaint, by Category: Misrepresentation of People’s Views

Allegations Regarding the IPCC’s First Assessment Report

[Comment 73: The First Assessment Report (FAR) of the IPCC, published in 1990, predicted temperature rises by the end of the 21st century of 3°C (as a “best guess” under “business-as-usual”) accompanied by a sea level rise of 65cm. Both figures are consistent with the later reports (http://tinyurl.com/2trfqy and http://tinyurl.com/2xl4c6 [IPCC 2001, 2007]), and although posing a serious problem, it could not be construed as “disastrous”. The IPCC also acknowledged considerable uncertainty in these projections, and were very cautious in their language. For example, in the Executive Summary they stated that “[r]apid changes in climate will change the composition of ecosystems: some species will benefit while others will be unable to migrate and will become extinct” – a balanced assessment, incompatible with warnings of unmitigated disaster.

This caution, given the considerable uncertainties in 1990, is also reflected in their conclusion that “The size of the warming [so far] is broadly consistent with predictions of climate models, but it is also of the same magnitude as natural climate variability. Thus the observed increase could be largely due to this natural variability; alternatively this variability and other human factors could have offset a still larger human-induced greenhouse gas warming. The unequivocal detection of the enhanced greenhouse effect from observations is not likely for a decade or more.” Bert Bolin (the IPCC Chairman at the time) has noted that “this statement describes very well the state of knowledge in 1990 and research during the fifteen years since then shows that this conclusion was indeed well expressed and largely correct.” (see Professor Bolin’s comments in Appendix G: page 48). Subsequent IPCC reports have progressively strengthened the conclusion that humans are changing the climate, consistent with their conclusions being driven by accumulating evidence, rather than the desire to conform to a pre-existing ideology.]

(In breach of Ofcom 5.7)

[Comment 74: The IPCC First Assessment Report does in fact acknowledge and discuss the role of variability of the Sun, in the Summary for Policy Makers and in the main text (Section 2.3.1, p61-63). Other factors that influence the climate, apart from carbon dioxide and the sun, were also discussed in the Report.

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