THE good news for climate sceptics is that a speaker at a major British conference on climate change agreed that arch-sceptic Pat Michaels had a point. The bad news is that it was Myles Allen, the Oxford physicist who recently grabbed the headlines by suggesting that 11 掳C of warming could be in the pipeline.
Allen was underlining what others had said off-platform: that the desire for consensus has too often led the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to don blinkers. This has not only blotted out the arguments of sceptics, but also sidelined results from climate models that keep producing 鈥渙utlier鈥� predictions of horrendous warming. As one scientist said last week: 鈥渂y ignoring the outliers, IPCC has failed for 10 years to investigate the possible effects of more extreme climate change.鈥�
Last week鈥檚 conference, called by the British government to ask what dangerous climate change might look like, concluded that the risks are 鈥渕ore serious than previously thought鈥�. We may be close to tipping points that trigger irreversible events such as collapsing ice sheets and the emptying of huge natural stores of greenhouse gases (see 鈥淎ct now before it鈥檚 too late鈥�). These findings have taken too long to get from the lab to newspaper front pages. But politicians can no longer claim they do not know about them.
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The sceptics have been right to pick away at the IPCC, and though their arguments have often been opportunistic and personal, they have spotted the stifling impact of consensus-building (see 鈥淐limate change: Menace or myth?鈥�). But in their enthusiasm to debunk climate change, they have failed to grasp one alarming possibility. The IPCC could be underestimating, not overestimating, the threat that the world faces.
