The IPCC will be using new scenarios for its future work, updating those produced in 2000, the so-called SRES scenarios. This would be good news, since, as we argued in Nature last month, the IPCC scenarios contain some dubious assumptions (PDF). But from the looks of it, it does not appear that much has changed, excpet the jargon. The figure below compares the new scenarios as presented in a report from a meeting of the IPCC held last month (source: PDF) with those from the 2000 IPCC SRES report. I have presented the two sets of scenarios on the same scale to facilitate comparison. Do they look much different to you?

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