Mark Colvin reported this story on Friday, December 14, 2012 18:18:00

MARK COLVIN: A blogger has put most of the drafts of the fifth International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, due next year, on the internet.



The blogger Alec Rawls is a climate change sceptic.



He and other climate sceptic journalists and bloggers have isolated one section of the draft to suggest that cosmic rays, such as those of the sun, may have a greater influence on warming than had been claimed.



The leaked IPCC drafts cover a range of subjects from the quality of climate models to measurements of sea level rise and Arctic ice loss.



Professor Steve Sherwood is a director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales.



He is also a lead author of chapter seven of the IPCC report, which happens to be the one the sceptics are claiming for their side.



But Professor Sherwood is scornful of the idea that the chapter he helped write confirms a greater role for solar and other cosmic rays in global warming.



STEVE SHERWOOD: Oh that's completely ridiculous. I'm sure you could go and read those paragraphs yourself and the summary of it and see that we conclude exactly the opposite, that this cosmic ray effect that the paragraph is discussing appears to be negligible.



MARK COLVIN: They're saying that it is the first indication that the IPCC recognises something called solar forcing.



STEVE SHERWOOD: It's not the first time it recognises it. What it shows is that we looked at this. We look at everything. The IPCC has a very comprehensive process where we try to look at all the influences on climate and so we looked at this one.



And there have been a couple of papers suggesting that solar forcing affects climate through cosmic ray/cloud interactions, but most of the literature on this shows that that doesn't actually work.



MARK COLVIN: So you're saying that you've managed to basically eliminate this idea that sunspots or whatever are more responsible for global warming than human activity.



STEVE SHERWOOD: Based on the peer-reviewed literature that's available now, that looks extremely unlikely.



MARK COLVIN: So what have these people done? Is this just a case of cherry-picking a sentence?



STEVE SHERWOOD: Yeah, it's a pretty severe case of that, because even the sentence doesn't say what they say and certainly if you look at the context, we're really saying the opposite.



MARK COLVIN: And what does the whole leak of the report mean? Should we be reading this leak now and working out what is going to be recommended next year, or is it just a series of early drafts?



STEVE SHERWOOD: We're getting on in the process. We're at the stage where we're trying to get input from as broad a cross-section of the community as possible to make sure that we haven't left any stone unturned in writing this report, and it's unfortunate that someone has exploited our effort to do that by splashing it out in the public where people can pick over it.



But, you know, look at it if you want, but I would suggest to people to wait for the final report to come out, which will be better than the draft that's there now.



MARK COLVIN: Professor Steve Sherwood, director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales and co-author of chapter seven of the IPCC draft report.



John Cook is Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, and runs the Skeptical Science blog.



He's been following the situation and he says it's clear that warming is, if anything, worse than predicted in the last IPCC report.



JOHN COOK: From what I know, just from talking to scientists who are working on the report, one of the main differences between the previous IPCC report and this one is now they're including the role of ice sheets on sea level rise.



Previously, the IPCC didn't include ice sheets because they just weren't sure what was going to happen. Since then, since 2007, we've seen ice sheets that have been sliding faster and faster into the oceans. Ice sheet loss has accelerated, and so they're contributing more and more to sea level rise.



So consequently, predicted sea level rise by the end of this century - back in the fourth assessment report in 2007, I think it was around 20 centimetres. Now it's getting up towards one metre by the end of this century.



MARK COLVIN: Does a big document dump like this indicate that the IPCC's current system, which is sort of semi-private, semi-public, just isn't really suitable for the blog and web age?



JOHN COOK: Yeah, it's not the ideal situation, and I hate to say it, but the IPCC have been, I guess, slow to adjust to the modern ways of communication. I guess, like the 24 hour cycle - and with blogs, it's more like 24 second cycle, things get tweeted and blogged pretty much instantaneously.



So when something like this happens, there needs to be a very quick response, which is why my own blog, Skeptical Science, we try to respond very quickly in putting these statements in a proper context.



MARK COLVIN: The Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, John Cook.