Climate science by consensus.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on April 6 released the Fourth Assessment of Working Group II on Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. The report, which is the result of bureaucratic consensus building rather than the old-school scientific method, once again paints a bleak picture of a world on the brink of ecosystem catastrophe.

According to the summary of the report, human-induced global warming is the engine behind a wide variety of emerging cataclysms, including "changes in Arctic and Antarctic ecosystems," "warming of lakes and rivers," and "earlier timing of spring events."

In the wake of the IPCC report, Australian climate scientist Bob Carter, a research professor at James Cook University, took aim at the IPCC's findings. In a lengthy article published in the London Telegraph, Carter pointed out that the "science arguments for a dangerous human influence on global warming have, if any thing, become weaker since the establishment of the IPCC in 1988," the latest IPCC report notwithstanding.

Far from being a catastrophe, according to Carter, the moderate climate of the modern age has been a boon to human civilization. "For more than 90 per cent of recent geological time, the [ice] cores show that the earth has been colder than today. We modern humans are lucky to live towards the end of the most recent of the intermittent, and welcome, warm interludes."