This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 26, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

The UN's Panel on Climate Change is about to come out with its next assessment of the science of climate change,

and as is the nature with these kinds of reports, they're behind the science.

So says Chip Napadberger with the Cato Institute's Center for the Study of Science.

Well, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, colloquially known as the IPCC,

releases an assessment report on sort of the state of climate change.

They do this every five to seven years and they're in the midst of working on their fifth assessment

report, which in final form of we released in 2014.

The contents of this report are sort of being leaked out as the final touches are being

put on the report.

And it seems like they're going to tell us that we are more certain that humans are involved

in creating the global warming that's occurred in the past 50 years or so.

And I think they're also going to tell us that the amount of global warming for a unit amount of

greenhouse gas emissions is going to be slightly lower than they thought it was just seven years ago.

What does that mean?

Well, it's something called the equilibrium climate sensitivity and it's how much the

average surface temperatures of the Earth will increase for a doubling of the

amount of carbon dioxide that's in the Earth's atmosphere.

And so if you double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by emitting carbon dioxide

and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from burning coal and other

fossil fuels, oil, natural gas, you would like to know how much of a climate impact that's going

to have. And so that's what the climate

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