Well; up to a point, Lord Copper.
So says Yvo de Boer of the UN's next climate change report. UNDPWatch says ...
THE next United Nations climate report will ''scare the wits out of everyone'' and should provide the impetus needed for the world to finally sign an agreement to tackle global warming, the former head of the UN negotiations said. Yvo de Boer, the UN climate chief during the 2009 Copenhagen climate change talks, said his conversations with scientists working on the next report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested the findings would be shocking.
"That report is going to scare the wits out of everyone,'' Mr de Boer said in the only scheduled interview of his visit to Australia. "I'm confident those scientific findings will create new political momentum.''
The report, the IPCC's 5th global assessment, will be published in around a year's time. Thanks to Phil Payne for pointing me to this classic piece of hype which got wide coverage in Australia, but not here. See the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian.
I say it's hype because, to be scared to death, people will need to be listening, and they're not. The notion that "everyone" is doing anything very much in relation to climate change is ludicrous. But communication has never been the IPCC's strong suit. I wonder what they have in mind to help "everyone" take note this time. They should remember that classic [ but probably apocryphal ] frog experiment, perhaps, and bear in mind that we're already in pretty warm water.
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