AGW Watch: Leaked IPCC Report Admits Solar Forcing and No Recent Warming...

As Anthony Watts says, this is a major bombshell.

The IPCC is in the midst of its process for finalizing and releasing AR5, its next report on anthropogenic global warming.  Alec Rawls is one of the IPCC “expert reviewers”, and he decided to break his confidentiality agreement with the IPCC and released the working draft.  You can read all about his reasons, and download the working draft itself, from Mr. Watts wonderful site WUWT.

I know of two big pieces of news in the leaked report, though I'm sure there will be more, as more people get to chew on the data.  The first one is illustrated in the graph (from the report!) at right: the IPCC is itself reporting that observed temperatures have not trended upwards since the late '90s, in direct contrast to the upward trends predicted by all of the IPCC's climate models.  Skeptics have been reporting this for five years, and until now the IPCC has been denying it.

Probably even more relevant, though, is the discussions in the draft report about solar forcing.  The IPCC scientists (some of them, at least) are reporting strong evidence for amplified solar forcing, even though they don't know the mechanism.  This is precisely what many skeptical scientists have been saying for years: that there is strong evidence that climate variations are caused (in large part, anyway) by variations in solar radiance.  Much of the evidence is observational: high correlation between solar radiance and global temperature.  Some is experimental, most especially the recent experiments (and related observations) about solar wind, cosmic rays, and cloud seeding.  The IPCC has heretofore resolutely denied that solar forcing was playing any part at all in climate change – this represents a radical revision of that position.

This is the first time a draft IPCC report has been leaked.  The first thought I had upon reading the news (and the report) was this: has this same sort of information been in prior reports, but then removed before publication?  That would be precisely the sort of thing a corrupt science bureaucracy would do to protect its own funding...