It is now just over a year since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its most recent assessment of the scientific evidence that human activity is changing the climate. As a media event this was a spectacular success, with alarming global warming stories dominating the headlines for many months thereafter. But did the news services and papers report what the scientists actually said, or what the IPCC wanted policy makers and the general public think that they said?

On 2nd Feb 2007, the UN News Service launched the Summary for Policymakers (Working Group 1) of its Fourth Assessment Report with a press release that started like this:

Evidence is now ‘unequivocal’ that humans are causing global warming – UN report

2 February 2007 – Changes in the atmosphere, the oceans and glaciers and ice caps now show unequivocally that the world is warming due to human activities, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in new report released today in Paris.
Here

Note that the headline uses the word unequivocal in quotation marks, indicating a direct reference to what was said in the report, but in fact the word unequivocal is only used once in the report, and not in this context. On page 4, the following paragraph refers to warming of the climate, but not to the cause: Continue reading »