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Other skeptics have used recent revelations of a few errors in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to attack the very notion of global warming and the basis for the EPA's ruling that CO2 is a human health hazard. "The EPA's endangerment finding rests on bad science," Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, a Republican, said at an annual Senate hearing on the EPA's budget on Tuesday, Feb. 23. "The EPA needs to start over." (See pictures of the effects of global warming...
...IPCC supporters point out that the global body does a self-assessment after every major report, looking at what went wrong and what can be improved. Communication will be key - in the case of the mistake about the Himalayan glaciers, some glaciologists have said they knew about the error and tried to alert the IPCC before publication, but were unable to get it fixed. There will inevitably be improvement as the IPCC moves forward, says Bob Corell, a scientist with the Arctic Governance Project and the Global Environment and Technology Foundation. Each time it gets better...
...pressure on the IPCC to be flawless will only increase as the political climate on climate change heats up. And yet, it's much harder to predict the future impact of global warming accurately, especially at the local and regional level, than it is to build the broader case that more carbon dioxide means higher temperatures. But that's exactly the sort of information policymakers will need to prepare for climate change going forward, and it's exactly the sort of information most at risk of being hyped...
...meantime, the IPCC will remain a political football, as supporters and opponents of climate action battle in Washington. For the public, however, none of the scientific infighting really matters. A survey released last week by Frank Luntz, a veteran Republican pollster, found that despite all the noise, substantial majorities of Americans on both sides of the political divide believe that climate change is real, and that something needs to be done about it. They don't want to know the details - the exact speed of the Himalayan glaciers' melt is not going to motivate the public one way or another...
Instead, Luntz counseled advocates to focus on the energy independence and green jobs that could result from action on energy and climate change. For climate scientists, questions about the IPCC won't end anytime soon. But for the rest of us, the only question that will matter is whether taking action on energy can really help jump-start the American economy...