The reason for this furtive last-minute insertion behind the backs of the “2,500 scientists” may have been the revelation by the Science Correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph, some weeks before publication of the report, that the UN had drastically reduced its high-end projection of the rise in sea level to 2100, from 3 feet to less than 2 feet.

Observed rate of sea-level rise and estimated contributions from different sources

  After protests from the author of the present paper, the UN quietly corrected Table SPM-0, and diverted attention from what they had done by relabeling it Table SPM-1.

By then, of course, the intended damage had been deftly done. Thousands of journalists worldwide had written excitable articles about the impending (though in reality non-existent) acceleration in the rate at which the Greenland and Antarctic ice-caps would melt.

In the final version of the table, units have been changed from metres per century in the previous version to millimetres per year.

Why did the IPCC’s 2,500 scientists fail to spot so serious an error? Because the table did not appear at all in the final draft of the Summary for Policymakers that the scientists had worked on. This episode demonstrates with great clarity that it is incorrect to assume that all of the 2,500 scientists said to have participated in the IPCC’s working groups have even seen, let alone accepted, the final text that has been published in their names.

The UN fails to state that its reduced best estimate of a 30cm sea-level rise (just 1 ft per century) is less than a third of the average centennial rise in sea level since the end of the last Ice Age.

The last-minute list of contributions to sea-level rise does not include an item quantifying the effects on sea level of the extraction of groundwater in all parts of the world.

Morner (2004), the world’s foremost expert on sea-level change, has written –

“There is a total absence of any recent ‘acceleration in sea level rise’ as often claimed by IPCC and related groups.”

Finally, it is worth noting that the UN’s brief but, in public-relations terms, ingeniously effective 900% exaggeration of the projected contributions of the Antarctic and Greenland ice-caps to future increases in global sea level is an echo of Al Gore’s 12,000% exaggeration of precisely the same topic.

Why? Because, as the BBC knows, pictures of glacial ice collapsing into the sea are a telegenic method of misleading the viewers into believing that the greatest of the imagined threats from “global warming”, namely the supposedly imminent 20ft rise in global sea level and the consequent displacement of tens of millions of people, is true when, insofar as there is a “consensus” among climate scientists, that “consensus” is to the effect that there is little danger of a 20ft rise in sea level until several millennia have passed, and that most of the rise in sea level is likely to be natural.

From this episode we know that the “2,500 scientists” who, we are told, approved every word of the politically-charged 2007 UN report on climate change could not have done so.