Climate Sensitivity

Ronald Bailey Wonders If the U.N.'s IPCC Climate Models Can Be Trusted

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NewGlobalWarmingImage
Meryll: Dreamstime

Pretty much everyone concerned with this issue agrees the world is warming. But what is causing the planet to warm up? The new scientific report from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued earlier this week flatly declared that it is "extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century." One way to probe this claim is to see how well the computer climate models relied upon by the IPCC do at simulating observed temperature trends. The IPCC says that the models do just fine, but Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey suggests that there is room for doubt.