Wrong doesn't even begin to describe it.

I don't want to say that I'm better than the Editorial Page of the Wall Street Journal, but did they even read the recently released IPCC Summary for PolicyMakers (SPM)?

Two easy examples:

"The document that caused such a stir was only a short policy report, a summary of the full scientific report due in May. Written mainly by policymakers (not scientists) who have a stake in the issue, the summary was long on dire predictions."

Written BY policymakers? It was written FOR policymakers. I've read Jonathan Overpeck's (one of the authors) papers in a class on Global Environmental Change. He's a scientist, not a policymaker. Google any of the other names and you'll find them to be scientists.

"More pertinent is the underlying scientific report. And according to people who have seen that draft, it contains startling revisions of previous U.N. predictions. For example, the Center for Science and Public Policy has just released an illuminating analysis written by Lord Christopher Monckton, a one-time adviser to Margaret Thatcher who has become a voice of sanity on global warming."

"Take rising sea levels. In its 2001 report, the U.N.'s best high-end estimate of the rise in sea levels by 2100 was three feet. Lord Monckton notes that the upcoming report's high-end best estimate is 17 inches, or half the previous prediction."

Now, 17 inches is 0.4318m. In the IPCC SPM report's Table SPM-2, they used 6 different scenarios to predict what the projected sea level rise would be by 2100 (technically 2099). According to this, the lowest project rise to the highest projected rise will be between 0.18 to 0.59m. That's 7.08 inches to 23.22 inches. Whether almost two feet is vastly different from the three feet is up to you. It's still not the 17 inches that they publish as the 'high end'. Now there's only one other place where the number 17 comes up:

"Global average sea level rose at an average rate of 1.8 [1.3 to 2.3] mm per year over 1961 to 2003. The rate was faster over 1993 to 2003, about 3.1 [2.4 to 3.8] mm per year. Whether the faster rate for 1993 to 2003 reflects decadal variability or an increase in the longer-term trend is unclear. There is high confidence that the rate of observed sea level rise increased from the 19th to the 20th century. The total 20th century rise is estimated to be 0.17 [0.12 to 0.22] m. {5.5}"

Now, I'm not saying that's exactly where they got it from, but I have no other explanation for how they came up with that number, except that this Lord Monckton is wrong, in which case, the Wall Street Journal should stop quoting him.

I was going to write more about their inaccuracies with the supposed 'dispute' over the Mann et al. article, but RealClimate (a blog published by climate scientists), have enough rebuttal points HERE and HERE. Just checking now, they've also posted a response to this editorial HERE.

My final point is based on this:

"The IPCC report should be understood as one more contribution to the warming debate, not some definitive last word that justifies radical policy change. It can be hard to keep one's head when everyone else is predicting the Apocalypse, but that's all the more reason to keep cool and focus on the actual science."

I agree that we should keep cool and focus on the science. It's just too bad they haven't. This summary, plus the final report coming out in May, was written by 450 scientific authors with input by another 800+ contributing authors and peer-reviewed by another 2500 scientists. And they're ALL telling us the same thing. What more do they want? Again, have one scientific paper (Soon and Bailunas comes to mind) that calls into question climate change BUT has refuted on a scientific basis, and the whole science is called into question. Have a report written, read and edited by thousands of scientists (because surprise, climate change has so many complex factors that you need oceanologists, paleoclimatologists, atmospheric scientists etc. to weigh in on the forcings and the impacts) and it's "ONLY a contribution to the warming debate".

You can't win. You just can't win.