Word: ipcc
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Dates: during 2010-2010
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When it was awarded a share of the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may well have been one of the most respected organizations in the world...
...some, the IPCC's co-Nobelist, Al Gore, would never be anything more than a Democratic politician, and therefore inherently untrustworthy, but the global climate body rose above politics, having the benefit of being made up of thousands of scientists from more than 100 countries, who drew conclusions on climate change from countless peer-reviewed scientific studies. The Norwegian Nobel committee lauded the IPCC's fourth assessment report in 2007 as creating an ever broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming. (See pictures of the effects of global warming...
...mistake is a black eye for the IPCC and for the climate-science community as a whole. Climate scientists are still dealing with the Climategate controversy, which involved hacked e-mails from a major British climatology center that cast doubt on the solidity of evidence for global warming. (See pictures of the effects of global warming...
...still not clear exactly how the error made it into the IPCC's assessment, though climate scientists point out that the document was thousands of pages long and that the Himalaya claim wasn't included in the summary of the report, which was boiled down for policymakers and received the most attention from reviewers. "Honest mistakes do happen," admits Benjamin Santer, a climate modeler at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "The bulk of the science is clear and compelling and rests on multiple lines of evidence," he says, not just one case...
However, while climate scientists have built a nearly airtight case that climate change is happening and that manmade greenhouse-gas emissions are the primary cause, the IPCC's error demonstrates that it is still difficult to make tight predictions about the future - especially on a regional or local level...