Climate change draft report leaked online
2012-12-15 10:03
Geneva - A major report on climate change being compiled by
the United Nation's climate science panel was on Friday leaked online in what
appeared to be an attempt by a climate sceptic to discredit the panel.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said
the full draft of its Fifth Assessment Report, which is not set for official
publication until next September, had been published online by one of 800
experts contributing to the report.
The climate body did not identify the culprit, but a climate
sceptic named Alec Rawls announced in a blog posting that he was responsible.
He had published the full draft on a website called
"Stop Green Suicide", which had crashed by late Friday afternoon.
The IPCC is a favoured target for sceptics, who stirred a
scandal in the run-up to a UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009 by pointing
out flaws in the panel's landmark Fourth Assessment Report.
Perhaps anticipating a similar attack, the IPCC warned on Friday
that "the unauthorised and premature posting of the drafts (of the Fifth
Assessment Report), which are works in progress, may lead to confusion because
the text will necessarily change."
The body pointed out that the report had been reviewed in
October and November by the 800 experts and 26 governments, who together had
submitted 31 422 comments that needed to be considered.
It also stressed that the authors would still be accepting
peer-reviewed published literature contributions until mid-March.
"The text that has been posted is thus not the final
report," it said.
- SAPA
