Climate Skeptics Try to Use Leaked IPCC Draft to Vindicate their Irrational Stance

A leaked draft of a major report is erroneously being used by climate skeptics to suggest that cosmic rays are responsible for global warming rather than human activity. To make their case they cherry-pick one sentence of a 14-chapter draft report to try to undermine the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. One of the report's lead authors described this attempt as "completely ridiculous."

Professor Steve Sherwood, a director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, told ABC Radio in Australia: "You could go and read those paragraphs yourself and the summary of it and see that we conclude exactly the opposite, that this cosmic ray effect that the paragraph is discussing appears to be negligible … It's a pretty severe case of [cherry-picking], because even the sentence doesn't say what [climate sceptics] say and certainly if you look at the context, we're really saying the opposite."