From today's Autralian: Below is part of the above article.
Consider what the IPCC had to say about extreme weather events such as intense hurricanes. The cost of such events in terms of destroyed property and economic disruption has been rising steadily. Every peer-reviewed study has shown this is not because of rising temperatures but because more people live in harm's way.
Nonetheless, in the IPCC's influential 2007 assessment of climate change, the panel's Working Group II (charged with assessing the potential impact of global warming) chose to cite one, then unpublished study that supposedly found global warming had doubled damage costs over the past 35 years. In fact, when this study was finally published it stated categorically there was "insufficient evidence" to link the increased losses to global warming. In other words, what Working Group II reported was wrong.
Elsewhere in the 2007 assessment, Working Group II claimed that "up to 40 per cent of the Amazonian forests" were at imminent risk of being destroyed by global warming. The basis for this claim was a single report from the WWF that itself cited only one study, which didn't even look at climate change but rather at the impact of human activities such as logging and burning. In similar fashion, Working Group II claimed that "by 2020, in some [African] countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 per cent". Much quoted since, this alarming statistic turns out to have been based on a single, unreferenced bullet point from a report by an environmental think tank.
There are numerous other examples of similar shenanigans by Working Group II. Yet, aside from a grudging admission that its predictions about Himalayan glaciers were "poorly substantiated", the IPCC has yet to acknowledge, much less apologise for, any of the lapses.
