IPCC report leaked....
One of the stories we will be following right away is the upcoming release of the report on climate science by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This group painstakingly summarizes the latest in climate science every 5-6 years, and provides a summary for governments, policymakers, and other interested parties. It's the gold standard of climate science - a synthesis of peer-reviewed science, prepared and reviewed by a cast of hundreds (thousands?) of experts.
A near-final version of this report was leaked last week and many of its major conclusions have been spread across the web. These stories provide a summary:
The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/science/earth/extremely-likely-that-human-activity-is-driving-climate-change-panel-finds.html?pagewanted=all
See also The Week, Mother Jones, and the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang page.
If any of these reports strikes you as overly alarmist, then check out a recent paper by Naomi Oreskes and colleagues (Brysse et al. 2012) which details how the IPCC errs on the "side of least drama" - i.e., it is a conservative interpretation, because scientists are cautious people. Things will likely be worse.
Another paper (Rahmstorf et al. 2012) compared IPCC projections of future temperature and sea level with observations - they find that the IPCC consensus underestimated future sea level change dramatically, but was reasonably accurate in their temperature projections.
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