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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just delivered its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) since 1990. The IPCC was a bold innovation when it was established, and its accomplishments are singular. It was the conclusion in the IPCC First Assessment Report that the world is likely to see "a rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century ... that is greater than seen over the past 10,000 years that proved influential in catalyzing the negotiation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The conclusions of the Second Assessment with regard to the human influence on climate marked a paradigm shift in the policy debate that contributed to the negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol. IPCC conclusions from the Third, and now the Fourth, assessments have further solidified consensus behind the role of humans in changing the earth's climate....
Oppenheimer et al. (Thu,) studied this question.