"First Order Draft" (AR5) IPCC

The environmental-scientific world of climate change is being roiled yet again with controversy.  Out of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that took place in Qatar early in December, with the UNFCCC Congress of the Parties presiding, the science branch of the UN climate machine, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has produced a draft of its newest science report.

It is the unreleased report and its new educated hypotheses (since in science no one can actually know for certain, scientists speculate on the basis of known 'facts' which can alter their known attributes at any time, releasing new interpretations that belie the old) that have been quite possibly misinterpreted by climate skeptics - of which there are many.

One such skeptic who had been given permission to review the draft report with the proviso that it be kept out of the public sphere for the time being, did his review and then released his impressions to the public.  It is called the AR5 draft; now cited, quoted and distributed all over the world, thanks to the anti-regulation Alec Rawls who reviewed the 5th Assessment Report, a thousand-page document.

That document releasing the findings and the general agreement of the IPCC had prominently printed on every one of those thousand pages, the legend, hard to overlook, warning: "Do not cite, quote or distribute."  Cite: check; quote: check; distribute: check.  All done.  Oops, was that to have meant that the details of the document were not to be released?  So sorry.

Reviewing the fundamental physical science of global warming policy issues, the document was to have been released at some time in 2013.  But the thing of it is, the IPCC decided it would put the document up for review before release...  Mr. Rawls signed on as an expert reviewer, and duly received his copy. 

 It was not as though the IPCC committee had no knowledge of Mr. Rawls, no idea where his political/scientific theories lay.  Do not release?  Were they serious?

What he has released is his take on the document under review.  The review itself over rising temperature estimates, the sun's role in climate change, computer models, extreme weather events, that kind of thing. 

Once Mr. Rawls published his spin that the AR5 document contained a "game changing admission" that the sun's solar magnetic field affects climate (a well enough known and agreed-upon phenomenon in and of itself, with the extent to which climate is affected by flares and etc. not known), other skeptics felt free to chime in.

There's the fact that the IPCC's previous computer temperature warning haven't materialised.  Projected rises based on models over the last two decades were countered by the reality that no increase has taken place. 

Claims also that the draft AR5 represents an "almost complete reversal" of previous IPCC claims with respect to trends in hurricanes, drought, floods.  Now, the IPCC states "low confidence" hurricanes have increased : "Current data sets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency."

The debate, the findings and the declarations and the warnings, the counter-observations and outraged commentary all set to take centre stage once again.