Welcome, this is Anastasia Glova and you're listening to the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 6th.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a summary last week of the fourth scientific assessment on global warming, which is a report that will be published in May.

The summary reports that global warming caused by human activities is now a virtual certainty,

but not everyone is in complete agreement as to the severity of the threat.

Cato Senior Fellow Pat Michaels, who wrote the book Meltdown, The Predictable Distortion of Global

Warming by scientists, politicians, and the media, qualifies some of the conclusion. of on Friday the United Nations released the summary for policy makers of the

fourth scientific assessment of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on

Climate Change, of which I am a member. This summary is 21 page distillation of a much

larger document that's just under 2,000 pages that isn't out yet. It will be out in May

but the summary for policy makers tells us much of what is

in the overall new assessment. So then what is the fourth scientific assessment?

Every five years the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assesses the scientific

state of global warming.

Now, you could call it a scientific assessment, but you have to be careful because everybody that's on this panel is

nominated by their governments.

And like a typical United Nations proceeding, there's equal weight between nations.

So places that don't do a lot of climate research or might not be on the

cutting edge probably nominate some bureaucrats while other countries may send

some real scientists. Can we expect any breakthrough announcements in this report?

Well, I like all the news stories that occurred when this came out.

Oh, global warming is real and caused by human beings.

This is a little bit like somebody discovering breathlessly that there's

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