One dissenting panel member has quit over late breaking papers being published.

Dr. Pielke said he decided to resign after three papers on the troposphere trends were published online on Aug. 11 by the journal Science. The papers said errors in satellite and balloon studies in the tropics explained why earlier analyses failed to find warming in the troposphere.

Dr. Pielke said those statements were an effort to influence the shape of the final report.

Several authors of those papers denied this, saying the process of creating the reports is intended to be public, while the contents remain confidential for now.

John R. Christy, another author of the coming report who like Dr. Pielke doubts that human-caused warming poses a serious threat, said that while disagreements were normal, the effort to generate the report was improving understanding.

"This process is the worst way to generate scientific information," said Dr. Christy, who teaches at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. "Except for all the others." How true.

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that experts in the field still do disagree over this issue.