As one of the world's most respected voices on climate change prepares the final draft of its latest report on the warming planet, a debate is playing out behind the scenes as to whether it is intentionally downplaying the potential impacts.
As the U.N.'s Nobel Peace Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change prepares to release its latest report at the end of the month, Justin Gillis looks at "two big fights" that are brewing over mainstream and outlier predictions of future sea level and temperature increases.
"Climate change skeptics often disparage these periodic reports from the United Nations, claiming that the panel writing them routinely stretches the boundaries of scientific evidence to make the problem look as dire as possible. So it is interesting to see that in these two important cases, the panel seems to be bending over backward to be scientifically conservative," he observes.
"Is it right to throw out bleeding-edge science in the one case while keeping it in the other? That is hard to judge for anybody who is not a working climate scientist."
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