Why does the media hide just how diluted the politicians forced the Global climate report to be? If it was not for the internet sites like climate science watch.org would anyone outside the inside game know what happened? As usual it is an internet site http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2007/04/diplomatically_pissing_into_th.php that has the details missing from your local paper's "news" and "opinion" pages. It is a long list of changes, but for the record here is my short list based on that write up of the changes in the just the first 6 pages of the 21 page document:
The scientists wanted to note greatly increased number and quality of data sets giving very high confidence (better than 90% statistically speaking), but the Chinese and Indian politicians needed to note a scarcity of studies from developing countries, and demanding the dropping of "high confidence" so that only insides would know about the greater than 90% confidence level. The fact that the anthropogenic (human activities) component of warming over the last three decades has had a discernible influence on many physical and biological systems [high confidence](meaning a greater than 80% likelyhood) was reported as "likely" only (meaning greater than 66% likelyhood).
The risk of glacial burst floods as water under the ice is released downsteam http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6391801.stm to destroy homes was "increased numbers of glacial lakes, with increased risk of outburst floods" per the scientists but only "increased numbers of glacial lakes" per the politians.
The "increasing ground instability in mountain and other permafrost regions, and ice and rock avalanches in mountain regions" became "increasing ground instability in permafrost regions, and rock avalanches in mountain regions" - God only knows why the politicians needed the change. It's as odd as refusing to note that longer growing seasons will come with more "CO2" and "some coastal zones affected by erosion due to sea-level rise", as the scientists had noted. Indeed changing the published world change map to change areas the scientists feel they need more data into areas where not much change was happening (white areas changed to light green color) seems to be for easy media excerpting of a lie. Indeed the report's "mid-century, annual average river runoff and water availability are projected to increase by 10-40% at high latitudes and in some wet tropical areas, and decrease by 10-30% over some dry regions at mid-latitudes and in the dry tropics, some of which are presently water stressed areas" originally had confidence levels of"likely" or "very likely" instead of the lesser word "projected", so the media is told it's only a projection and not to worry.