IPCC Takes A Small Step Back From Climate Change Gloom And Doom

by Ben Bullard 
It’s nothing close to a sea change, but it appears that the forthcoming United Nations report from its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will reflect, at least in its economic data set, a toned-down version of the alarmist, world-wrecking global warming propaganda for which the IPCC has become infamous.
Real-world events, coupled with the passage of time, have left the IPCC little choice but to grudgingly acknowledge, in as face-saving a way as is possible, that its predictions concerning the economic costs of man-made global warming have been pessimistically high.
According to a leaked draft of the IPCC report, due for release later this month, the global economic toll of weather-related events attributable (by the IPCC) to anthropogenic climate change has been ratcheted down from an estimate of 5 percent to 20 percent of world gross domestic product to somewhere between .2 percent and 2 percent.

“If the lower estimate is correct, then all it would take is an annual growth rate of 2.4 percent (currently it’s around 3 percent) for the economic costs of climate change to be wiped out within a month,” observed Breitbart‘s Nick Hallett Wednesday. “This admission by the IPCC will come as a huge blow to those alarmists — notably the Stern Review’s author but also including everyone from the Prince of Wales to Al Gore — who argues that costly intervention now is our only hope if we are to stave off the potentially disastrous effects of climate change.”
The flipside of this news is that the IPCC isn’t likely to stress the change in the part of its report that matters most: the Summary for Policymakers. The Summary is far more widely read — and cited by global warming apologists in government — than any of the data that underpins the Summary’s opinionated findings.
That has irked one of the IPCC report’s lead authors, who this week requested the panel remove his name from the summary document because of its inflated, “four hoursemen of the Apocalypse” tone.
“The message in the first draft was that through adaptation and clever development these were manageable risks, but it did require we get our act together. This has completely disappeared from the draft now, which is all about the impacts of climate change and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. This is a missed opportunity,” wrote Richard Tol, a University of Sussex economist who served as lead author on report’s chapter economic impacts section.