What climate scientists talk about now - FT.com

This is well-worth reading, about the IPCC and its upcoming 5th Assessment Report, from the Financial Times:

What climate scientists talk about now
By Pilita Clark, August 2
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/4084c8ee-fa36-11e2-98e0-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2b7Ee2t2z

For example:

[Thomas] Stocker remains resolutely confident about the robustness of the IPCC’s projections overall. “There is no other science and there’s no other activity of humans that looks into the future that has done so well as the IPCC,” he said. “Ask how well do the GDP projections fare for the next month. Ask how well do the projections of crop yields for the next year. Ask how well projections of DAX [the blue-chip German stock index] and all these other indices fare."

and

But [Peter] Wadhams is even angrier about another line in that last IPCC report suggesting it could take until the latter part of this century before Arctic summer sea ice disappears almost entirely. The sea ice that covers much of the North Pole always melts a little in summer and then refreezes as winter sets in. Last summer, however, it shrank to its lowest point in more than 30 years, a much more dramatic decline than predicted. Wadhams thinks it more likely that its summer sea ice will vanish as soon as 2015.

“It could even be this year or next year but not later than 2015 there won’t be any ice in the Arctic in the summer,” he said, pulling out a battered laptop to show a diagram explaining his calculations, which he calls “the Arctic death spiral”.

Read the whole thing.