What do you know about global warming? In the case of the IPCC, maybe you know a lot more - IPCC finally admits that paving over tropical forests is a major factor in climate change
Read here. Most people, having even an ounce of common sense, would correctly conclude that paving over agricultural lands with asphalt or that destroying forests to plant bio-fuel crops would have a major influence on temperatures. Amazingly, for the past 20 years, the IPCC has claimed that changes in such 'land-use' had little impact.
The IPCC and its closely controlled peer review journals have now admitted that land-use changes do indeed have a major impact on climate change and local/regional and even global temperatures. The IPCC will now include land-use changes as a major forcing in its "climate bible" assessments.
Honestly, is it any wonder the IPCC's climate models have been abysmally bad over the last 20 years at predicting global temperatures when such an obviously idiotic failure is finally admitted to?
"There is an article in the March 15 2012 issue of Nature that finally elevates land use change to its proper level as a first order climate forcing. While the article still does not recognize that land conversion, particularly in the low latitudes but also in the boreal forest regions continues and, therefore, will add further to how humans are altering the climate, it is an important step for the IPCC to finally make. In 1995 I resigned from the IPCC after efforts to get them to mention this issue were rebuffed..."
What do you know about global warming? The IPCC and its impact on tropical deforestation
Because the IPCC failed to correctly recognize, identify and publicly state that land-use changes were a primary driver of climate change and temperatures, wealthy individuals like George Soros and Richard Branson have been provided incentives to trash natural forested habitats, to be replaced with money producing bio-fuel agriculture plots (e.g., palm plantations). Now that the IPCC has belatedly recognized the importance of land-use changes on climate, possibly the world's wealthy elites will no longer be able to invest in major natural habitat changing projects.
Previous non-CO2 climate impacts and bio-fuel postings.