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Tomorrow the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will release a major report with grim predictions about global warming for the coming decades, according to journalists who have seen draft versions of the paper.
If the IPCC's recent track record is any indication, the predictions will be no exaggeration, an analysis posted today on the Web site of the journal Science suggests.
The Science study compared actual climate measurements with the computer models from a 2001 IPCC report.
In recent years actual concentrations of carbon dioxide—a greenhouse gas linked to global warming—have followed almost exactly the projections of the 2001 IPCC report.
If anything, the IPCC may have underestimated some climate threats in 2001. For example, actual temperatures were at the high end of the predicted range. And sea levels have actually risen faster than predicted.
"The real climate system is changing as fast or in some components even faster than expected by [the] IPCC," Stefan Rahmstorf, an ocean physicist at Potsdam University in Germany, said by email.
