IPCC

UN climate science chief Rajendra Pachauri welcomed today's announcement of an outside audit that could help scientists win back public and political support for the battered consensus on human-caused climate change.

"It is critically important that the science we bring into our reports — and that we disseminate on a wide scale — is accepted by communities across the globe, by governments, by businesses, by civil society," Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said at UN headquarters.

The remark followed UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's formal announcement that an independent review of the IPCC would be carried out by the Amsterdam-based InterAcademy Council (ICA), a multinational organization of the world's science and engineering academies.

Prominent British researchers at the heart of the hacked email scandal shot down accusations of illegally withholding scientific information charting the planet's temperature, telling a parliamentary hearing that certain governments had prohibited them from publishing all the raw data.

Phil Jones (photo), head scientist of the premier Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, acknowledged that he refused requests for the institute's raw climate data, but only because of confidentiality agreements with national weather stations supplying the figures.

"No breach of the law has been established," said Edward Acton, vice chancellor of university.

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• Stacy Feldman's blog
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Fifty-five scientists from the Netherlands released the following open letter about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and errors discovered in its 2007 report on climate change.

In the letter, they explain how the IPCC works, and how the errors drawing so much attention "do not alter the key finding that human beings are very likely changing the climate, with far reaching impacts in the long run."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s last assessment of scientific research related to climate change was issued in 2007. Almost three years later, recognizing the need for an update ahead of next month’s climate talks in Copenhagen, a group of IPCC authors and other scientists released a report today that tries to fill that data gap.

What they found is a climate changing at a rate that outstrips what the IPCC projected just three years ago.

“There’s a common misconception that global warming has somehow paused or declined or reversed,” said Eric Steig, Professor of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington and one of the report’s 26 authors. “This report shows that is clearly not the case.”

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• Matthew Berger's blog
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The damage estimates are starting to roll in from the Midwest floods, and they’re staggering.

The American Farm Bureau Federation has put crop-related losses at around $7 billion -- and rising. Iowa alone accounts for more than half of that amount.

Add property damages of $1.5 billion to the total hit, and you arrive at a preliminary flood damage estimate of $8.5 billion.

That's a very low-ball number. And yet, it already puts the Midwest floods of ’08 at number two on the list of the most expensive non-hurricane flooding catastrophes in the US, ever. WunderBlog has that story.

Read it. And when you do, keep this in mind: Despite media neglect, global warming -- in part -- has caused the treacherous rains that have spawned those costly floods, as Climate Progress and many others have studiously catalogued.