"[2] The Synthesis Report gave its purpose as providing the scientific, technical and socio-economic information for determining what concentrations of greenhouse gases might be regarded as "dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system" and the charting of a future which allows for economic development which is sustainable.
Participating governments then provided review comments on the draft, incorporated into the assessment which was presented to seek acceptance at a plenary session of the IPCC.
Twenty participants from various countries met at the initial meeting in Livermore, California, in August 1994 to identify the scientific topic areas, and discussion continued by email.
[9] The Chapter 8 draft report put together on 5 October had an Executive Summary of the evidence, and after various qualifications, said "Taken together, these results point towards a human influence on climate."
Governments at the November plenary meeting in Madrid demanded changes to how this was worded in the Summary for Policymakers, after extended discussions Bolin suggested the adjective "discernible" and this was agreed.
The approved Summary for Policymakers includes a section headed "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate", setting out progress in detection and attribution studies, cautioning that "Our ability to quantify the human influence on global climate is currently limited because the expected signal is still emerging from the noise of natural variability, and because there are uncertainties in key factors."
[10][11] The summary at the start of the accepted version of the chapter stated that "these results indicate that the observed trend in global mean temperature over the past 100 years is unlikely to be entirely natural in origin.
[9] Three weeks later, and a week after the Second Assessment Report was released, the Global Climate Coalition was echoed in a letter published in The Wall Street Journal from the retired condensed matter physicist and former president of the US National Academy of Sciences, Frederick Seitz, chair of the George C. Marshall Institute and Science and Environmental Policy Project, but not a climatologist.
"[10] Other rebuttals of Seitz's comments include a 1997 paper[16] by Paul Edwards and IPCC author Stephen Schneider, and a 2007 complaint to the UK broadcast regulator Ofcom about the television programme, "The Great Global Warming Swindle".
[17] One of the controversies of the Second Assessment Working Group III report is the economic valuation of human life, which is used in monetized (i.e., converted into US dollar values) estimates of climate change impacts.