The UK House of Commons Energy and Climate Change committee has produced a report on its inquiry on the IPCC 5th Assessment WG1 contribution (physical science).
The inquiry concluded that WG1's message - that greenhouse gas release from deforestation and fossil fuel use has caused much of the climate change of the late 20th Century and will continue to drive warming if unabated - was "the best available summary of the prevailing scientific opinion on climate change currently available to policy-makers. Its conclusions have been reached with high statistical confidence by a working group made up of many of the world’s leading climate scientists drawing on areas of well-understood science. The overall thrust and conclusions of the report are widely supported in the scientific community and its summaries are presented in a way that is persuasive to the lay reader. As in all areas of science that involve highly complex dynamic systems, there are uncertainties. But these uncertainties do not blur the overwhelmingly clear picture of a climate system changing as a result of human influence."
The inquiry said that IPCC had responded well to criticism and had tightened its review processes to make AR5 "the most exhaustive and heavily scrutinised Assessment Report to date". However, the committee suggested an increase in the level of transparency by involving non-climate scientists as observers through the whole process. The committee said that "the thousands of peer-reviewed academic papers ...together form a clear and unambiguous picture of a climate that is being dangerously destabilised".
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