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The draft report will become the fourth assessment by the IPCC since it was established in 1988 and was meant to be confidential until the final version is ready for publication next year. But a copy of the report has been made available by a US Government committee and can be found on the internet by anyone who makes an email request for a password to access the area on its website.
The US Climate Change Science Programme, which yesterday released its own report saying climate change was being affected by man-made pollution, said it wanted as many experts and stakeholders as possible to comment on the draft IPCC report. The IPCC's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, however, did not learn of the decision to, in effect, publish the report until it was posted online, said the journal Nature. The IPCC assessment is written by scores of scientists - who can draw on the expertise of hundreds more researchers - to produce the most definitive and authoritative assessment of climate change.
Global warming sceptics will get little comfort from the confident language in the draft report, which dismisses suggestions that climate change is an entirely natural rather than man-made phenomenon. "There is widespread evidence of anthropogenic warming of the climate system in temperature observations taken at the surface, in the free atmosphere and in the oceans," it says. "It is very likely that greenhouse gas forcing has been the dominant cause of the observed global warming over the past 50 years.
"And it is likely that greenhouse gases alone would have caused more warming than has been observed during this period, with some warming offset by cooling from natural and other anthropogenic factors."
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http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&ObjectID=10380309
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