Watered down: the unedited IPCC scientific draft

Those who really care about the process behind the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports will probably want to grab this. It's a draft of Working Group II's Summary for Policymakers before the final editing session stripped it of some of the more dramatic (alarmist?) language following objections from China and Saudi Arabia. You know it's the earlier version because it has "The content of this draft should not be cited or quoted, and is embargoed from news coverage" on the cover page.

Thanks to Rick Piltz, who managed to get a hold of the draft posted it at his Climate Science Watch blog. You can compare it, line by line, with the official version, available at the IPCC website.

The changes are easy to find. For example, here's a line from page 2:

Many natural systems, on all continents and in some oceans, are being affected by regional climate changes, particularly temperature increases [very high confidence].

And here's how it reads afterwards the big bad bureaucrats have had their say:

Observational evidence from all continents and most oceans shows that many natural systems are being affected by regional climate changes, particularly high temperatures.

Subsequent edits change "very high confidence" to merely "high confidence" or, in the case of the anthropogenic causes of climate change, just as in the example above, any reference to degree of certainty (high confidence) was removed entirely, which reportedly was a compromise suggested by U.S. delegates.

Overall, the effects of these final edits are usually subtle, but almost always unnecessary and serve only to introduce in the reader's mind more doubt that actually exists among the scientific authors. But I suppose it could have been worse. And now the scientific report is out.