…and what the Gray Lady did. Sort of. Some acute observing at Spector Vision:
All the climate change news fit to print?
…
Flipping to the New York Times, I read about a report issued this week by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency — which comes as news to me. In the on-line version of the New York Times, a link is provided to the actual report, which went largely unreported in our media.
Like the British investigation, it appears that the Dutch environmental agency “found no errors that would undermine the main conclusions in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on possible future regional impacts of climate change.” However, the Dutch agency also concluded:
“the summaries in the IPCC Working Group II Report put an emphasis on projections of the more serious, negative impacts of climate change. This selection was an obvious choice, and also had been approved by the governments that constitute the IPCC. However, this meant that the less severe impacts and any positive effects did not make it into the summaries for policymakers, which made the overall tenor of the summaries more negative than that of the underlying chapters. For example, the possibly positive consequences for forestry in North Asia are named in one of the chapters, but they are not named in the summaries.
In addition, the investigated 32 summary conclusions on regional impacts do not mention other factors that play an important role, such as the influence of population growth on water shortages. The PBL recommends to present a broader representation of projected developments in the summaries for policy makers in the Fifth Assessment Reports in 2013 and 2014.”
The climate-gate e-mails had only a marginal influence at the Copenhagen conference: of the participating governments, only Saudi Arabia sought to give the ‘scandal’ any credence. The report of the Dutch agency, on the other hand, is something that all governments will have to mull over as they consider their next steps on the issue of climate change.
