Doomsday had to be postponed for five months, but ‘pausing’ IPCC writers have finally delivered another ‘Net Zero or Else’ report highlighting increasingly improbable climate change scenarios. Every IPCC report ramps up the desperation, and this latest ‘Synthesis Report‘ known as SYR is long on opinions, attributions and modelled results, but somewhat shorter on actual scientific facts.
The latest document collates the IPCC’s sixth assessments reports (AR6) into a short format that was originally scheduled to ramp up fears ahead of last year’s COP27 meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh. But in May and June last year, the planet-saving authors seem to have gone on strike. A few details about the incident are referred to in recently published IPCC minutes, which record how attempts were made with the writers to “rebuild the trust required to have them end their pause in writing, and to engage in the SYR production process”. Not before time, since IPCC reports need to be agreed with large numbers of interested parties, including almost 200 member governments. ‘Settled’ science, it need hardly be added, demands a lot of happy and settled funders.
Current global temperatures are said by the IPCC to be the highest for 125,000 years, an astonishing claim given the many scientific surveys that show much higher temperatures in the recent past. It is also claimed that temperatures will rise by 0.4°C in around a decade, an interesting opinion, based presumably on surface records that can be retrospectively adjusted, but an unlikely scenario given global warming ran out of steam over two decades ago. By 2100, the IPCC says global warming could rise to 4.4°C, although things need to be moving on a bit smartish given barely 0.1°C warming in the first two decades of the century.
There have been one or two concerns of late that the IPCC’s scare tactics have sent half the world doolally with climate fear, especially the impressionable young. These criticisms seem to have been taken on board. UN Secretary General Antonio ‘Code Red’ Guterres hailed SYR as a “survival guide to humanity”. All we need to do, continued the Left-wing Portuguese radical, is for all countries to bring forward their Net Zero plans by a decade. Dr. Friederike Otto from Imperial College specialises in so-called ‘attribution’ studies and the pseudoscience of claiming specific weather events are caused by the activities of humans. She helped write the latest report and was also in optimistic mood telling the BBC: “If we aim for 1.5°C and achieve 1.6°C, that is still much better than saying, it’s too late and we are doomed and I’m not even trying. And I think what this report shows very, very clearly is there is so much to win by trying.”
Back on Planet Reality, it might be noted that there are a number of possible disadvantages connected to removing fossil fuels, a reliable, inexpensive energy supply that powers 80% of global needs, within less than 17 years. Starvation, death, widespread warfare, societal and economic breakdown and rampant disease being just a few that come immediately to mind.
It is not difficult to see why the IPCC continues to claim current global temperatures are the highest for 125,000 years, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that shows this is untrue. The rebound rise of about 1°C seen over the last 200 years is very small, and similar changes have obviously occurred countless times in the historical and paleo past, sometimes over even shorter time periods. It is difficult to worry too much about something that seems natural and in fact is beyond the control of humans. Placing the rise in the longer context of 125,000 years and adding all manner of invented weather event attribution and ‘tipping’ point stories adds some firepower to a political narrative ultimately designed to move society towards the collectivist Net Zero agenda.
The Daily Sceptic has reported on a number of science papers that track the higher temperatures in the past, in particular the period since the last ice age started to lift about 12,000 years ago. A sample can be read here, here and here. Earlier this year, a group of European scientists published a paper analysing tree remains that suggested there was a much warmer climate in the Alps during most of the last 10,000 years.
‘Settled’ science, it might be observed, needs consensus from the world and his wife. The recent IPCC minutes, for instance, noted that the SYR team, “should ensure policy relevance and usefulness for policymakers”. Needless to say this is not to the taste of some independent-minded scientists, especially those retired with no need to hustle for state research or Left-wing foundation funds. In fact they can be quite disobliging about the entire IPCC process. In a recent paper titled ‘Challenging “Net Zero” with Science‘, Emeritus Professors William Happer and Richard Lindzen of Princeton and MIT respectively called Net Zero “scientifically invalid and a threat to the lives of billions of people”. In fact they have previously dismissed the peer review system around climate change as a “joke” – pal review, not peer review, they quipped. The IPCC is “government controlled and only issues government-dictated findings”.
“Climate science is awash with manipulated data, which provides no reliable scientific evidence,” they added.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Yes it’s all over the news here too, with an impressive amount of breathless, panic-inducing fear porn, and I’m sure it’s the same in all countries. They also want to cut the amount of flights from Schiphol by 60,000 by the end of 2024, because carbon emissions. Total crapola of course.
”Van Vuuren, who has been researching the climate for years for the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), summarizes the message in one word: Urgency. “We have come to a decisive moment,” said the climate expert, who is also a professor in Utrecht. “In almost all scenarios, we will temporarily exceed 1.5 degrees of warming, but there are also ways back.” If greenhouse gas emissions do not decrease sharply before 2030, a subsequent report from the IPCC “will have to conclude that 1.5 degrees is no longer possible.” But even then the attitude should not become: “Never mind,” warned the researcher. “Every tenth of a degree counts, 1.6 is better than 1.7.”
The IPCC has become more pessimistic about the consequences of global warming. The remaining “carbon budget,” the carbon dioxide emissions that the world can afford to produce, will be completely used up by 2030. The authors therefore see “deep, immediate emission reductions worldwide” as a dire necessity.”
https://nltimes.nl/2023/03/20/ipcc-global-warming-likely-pass-15-degree-mark-bright-spots
The IPCC has become more pessimistic about the consequences of global warming.
The obvious solution is to pack the IPCC into a spaceship and send them to a planet much more distant from the sun, say, Pluto, where they can than happily enjoy record low temperatures for the remainders of their lifes.
Why more distant from the Sun? Why not send them to the Sun?
They contain carbon. Burning them is only going to make everything worse.
LOL yes, if only that fantasy could become reality. I can think of a fair few others to be onboard with them on a one-way voyage into space. We Earthlings sure as hell would be a lot better off for it.
Or they could go to Mars. Temperature freezing, CO2 %age of atmosphere c95%.
Or Venus. Boiling. CO2 %age of atmosphere c95%.
Not to mention there is NO correlation, long or short term, between CO2 concentration and temperature.
Short term…
The reality of CO2 in the atmosphere…
And given that CO2 is now close to its maximum absorption, further increases will cause minimal temperature rises if that’s what it does (which seems not to be the case!)
And anyone terrified by post LIA temperature rise should seek urgent medical help…
I looked at the source quoted for this chart (https://judithcurry.com/2015/05/06/quantifying-the-anthropogenic-contribution-to-atmospheric-co2/) but couldn’t find the chart there. I wonder where you got it? (perhaps it used to be there and was removed). I am not surprised it is not there because Judith Curry is a serious scientist and so is the discussion in the post (which is not hers). This chart is misleading. It is utterly irrelevant that CO2 is a low concentration. All that means is there a lot of non-greenhouse gasses up there in addition to CO2. That low concentration amounts to many giga-tonnes and that is enough to make a big difference (after all most sceptics think it is enough to make a big difference to vegetation growth). This is accepted by even sceptical scientists such as Christy and Spencer.
Thank you for that. I recently visited the Perlan museum in Reykjavik. They had the same graph except the CO2 line started from about 20 years ago. I wonder why.
Me too. Lots of fatuous statements stating predictions from models as “fact”
I have lost count the number of ‘decisive’ moments’, ‘tipping points’, and ‘last chances’ – it’s like Peak Oil, always due but never arrives.
I know, it’s pathetic, it really is. Reads like a script from some Hollywood disaster movie.
Geologically, 125,000 years is nothing. Hence Global temperatures[*] are highest since 125,000 years really means Global temperatures within normal and expected ranges. This obviously calls for frantic climate action lest more people notice that.
[*] There is no such thing as a global temperature. Or rather, gobal temperature is a specimen of the species of Idiots with spreadsheets dividing unrelated numbers in order to create pointless quotients.
Hardly pointless. They produce money. For the authors. From people who pay them to produce these meaningless stats.
But current temperatures are not as high as during the Medieval Warm Period.
Climate action is about overcoming the deficiencies of the future today (Isn’t it a bit smug to believe to be able to do that? Who had predicted smartphones in 1995?). Overcoming the deficiencies of the past is something the history department is tirelessly working on. Give them enough time and they’ll find a way to prove that all of Europe was covered with glaciers until that fateful day in 1776 when Carbon(!!111) from the first commercially deployed steam engine made them disappear overnight and thus, caused a mass extinction event of beautiful furry polar bears which ended up being replaced by ugly hairless humans.
This video clip, showing a panel of climate scientists, suggests that during the last 10,000 years the Earth has been warmer than now 90% of the time – and the same applies over the 4.6 billion years of the Earth’s existence.
https://youtu.be/mqejXs7XgsU
I think you’ve missed the point I was trying to make: Homo sapiens, ie, our species, is said to have emerged about 300,000 years ago. If current global temperature are the highest since 125,000 years this means global temperatures were higher before. And this before encompasses about 60% (58 1/3%, to be precise) of the existence of the species Home sapiens. This means the IPCC claim is really Most of the time when humans were around on this planet, it was warmer than now. (!)
This obviously calls for urgent action to prevent a heat catastrophe.
Reducing Carbon dioxide reduce plant growth with will lead to famine and starvation.
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I think that’s the plan Stan.. 7 billion less useless eaters!
Great article, an important counter to the climate hysteria coming from the MSM.
What gets me is that so many of these ‘experts’ reckon that they know exactly how the climate will respond if we do or do not reach their sacred net-zero’ and yet I have seen no evidence to justify this hubris and arrogance. It seems to me that the climate is a huge complex system that will most likely ignore our puny efforts to have any influence.
What I cannot see is any way to challenge this? It is almost as if we are doomed to wait until the whole farrago of nonsense collapses?
I used to think it was all about the money, but now I’m not so sure it’s this alone. The world’s elites and their activist sycophants behave towards the rest of society like parents with Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy.
Parents (usually mothers) with this variant of a narcissistic personality disorder – often combined with sociopathy – will use their children’s illnesses to bolster their sense of importance, garnering status and attention by seeking out any symptom that can be exaggerated into something grave and life threatening, often causing illness through injury or poisoning, and certainly provoking mental illness in the form of severe anxiety disorders.
Reading the 1990’s reports of the Club of Rome who founded the IPCC, and looking at the increasingly unhinged babblings of the globalist, political and media classes, as well as the frustrated, unpopular Left who have aligned with them for a foothold to power, it seems this might be more than just an analogy for the abuse we’re suffering at the hands of these elites.
Unchallenged narcissism, a cultural shift towards morally untethered subjectivism, a growing divide between those who produce things and those who produce rules and narratives, a surrender to, and even cultural admiration for sociopathic behaviour, has led to a climate where individuals and groups in positions of power can cast themselves collectively as parental protectors of civilisation while at the same time exploiting this status for unearned capital.
With inevitably catastrophic meddling with the energy sector and now agriculture, and their longed for climate disasters failing to materialise, it looks like our unwanted, self-appointed parents are now attempting to provoke the civilisational maladies they’ve fantasised about for some time.
This would also explain the obsession of these groups with actual children – a section of society they see as the most exploitable, malleable and potentially beneficial to their aims.
JB you have nailed it ! Great post my friend 👍👏
We are 11 000 years into a global warming period after the last ice age.
That warming is so slight and slow it is impossible to measure it. it is not linear, it is erratic with periods of cooling following warming, which is why temperatures 1 000 years ago and 2 000 years ago were higher than today.
They have invented a computer generated set of numbers called Global Mean Temperature Anomaly. From this they claim to know ‘global temperatures’ and increases – but they cannot say what global temperatures ‘should be’.
By their own admission this is the only way they can show global warming. But it relies on average temperatures from no more than about 5% of the Earth’s surface, the instruments calibrate to a standard reference instrument so aggregating their readings will cause a big margin of error. They use algorithms to allow for and adjust for different factors such as Urban Heat Island effect, station drop-out and others.
It has a wide margin of error as a consequence, yet purports to be able to show global warming of tenths and thousands of a degree.
It is junk science.
In some multiple of ten thousands of years, Earth will most likely end up in a tropical age according to the cyclic rhythm of the Earth’s climate system these last 4.5 billion years.
Nothing Man does or doesn’t do will alter that.
These people are liars – like the safe and effective vaccines crowd.
Warrants a second comment: The so-called Paris Agreement was supposed to fix/ prevent this. That was adopted in 2015. It’s 8 years later now and the same people now claim something much more drastic is needed and that even the chances of that succeeding within the limits of the original plan are not good. This amounts to the tacit admission that they were all wrong in both 2015 and the run-up to 2015. So, why would they be right now?
Assuming they’re not, there are two options
1) Stretching credibility to its limits, they’ve again been much too optimistic in their modelling and everything will get much worse much quicker, IOW, we are doomed either way. Hence, bin the nonsense.
2) Their pessimism is as unjustified today as it was 8 years ago, hence, bin the nonsense and buy them an ice cream cone to make them occupy their time in more pleasurable ways.
We need to go back to base.
Who first broadcast the threat of Global Warming, who put the IPCC together. Answer : Maurice Strong, a Rockefeller cronie. The article below gives a little taster as to this man’s influence on present day events.
Sorry.. for some reason I can’t post a link.. shame.
Anyway for those frightened by the imaginary CO2 devil.. comfort and truth can be found in the graph below..
James Corbett’s “How Big Oil Conquered the World” is a good account of how the environmental movement was promoted by certain figures in the oil industry
https://www.corbettreport.com/bigoil/
Yes.. I’ve seen that one. I’ve a lot of time for the Corbettreport.
It was Maurice Strong (ex billionaire oilman) and the Club of Rome via the 1992 Rio Earth Summit that got the Global Warming / Agenda 21 nonsense underway.
I’ve said it lots of times now ! When can we see a sizeable destablising punch land back on the Barstewards collective chins !!??
Just imagine if the world (human race) suffered like it was the worst ever year to be alive! No, not 1349 the worst year of the black death but 536! The year with no summer..it’s thought a massive unknown volcanic eruption, possibly a super volcano, darkened the sky’s for months during the summer and led to the biggest world famine ever recorded in history!
None of this is impossible! (yellowstone is a super volcano) it could happen again.
So, what would you need to survive such a scenario if it was to happen now? All the combined knowledge and experience of all the worlds farmers!!! How glibly we close them down! It stems from years of plenty, we take our settled lives for granted.
The farms are being closed down for one specific reason.. to cause food shortages, food price inflation, and if the so called elites really get lucky.. starvation of the useless eaters.. Who of course won’t be eating any more, they’ll be dead!
Up until a couple of years ago, I believed the climate change official narrative – of course: all the scientists in the world are hardly going to be wrong! – but having seen how there can be worldwide manipulation and misleading presentation of Covid data and vaccination data, and a narrative pushed which isn’t supported by good science, I’m now very sceptical.
I’m still open minded and I watched Patrick Christys interviewing Donnachadh McCarthy, ‘a climate change columnist at the Independent’, earlier this afternoon on GBNews, and I was prepared to listen open mindedly to reasoned and rational argument from Donnachadh McCarthy, but it was nothing of the sort. He tried to guilt trip Patrick Christys into not asking any challenging questions, accusing him of irresponsibly causing doubt (very reminiscent of rational questioning people being accused of causing vaccine hesitancy) and thereby avoided answering the challenging questions.
He claimed that the floods in Pakistan last year were predicted by climate scientists which was therefore some kind of proof that the official climate change narrative is correct. But I looked up “List of deadliest floods” on Wikipedia, and there have been at least 60 worse floods before the 21st century. He said the same about drought in Somalia, but I don’t even have to look that one up, I know there have been droughts at least every few years somewhere in the world ever since I can remember.
So the ‘climate change columnist’ was very unimpressive and unpersuasive and his whole attitude was a quite unpleasant ‘how dare anyone question climate change’ attitude, rather than making any intelligent rational points.
I wonder how long it will be before the reliance on prophesy, aka modelling, is rejected as a basis for action. Maybe never if pandemic modelling is anything to go by. I am personally convinced that there is climate change, and there always has been, but this is mostly to do with sunspot cycles, changes in ocean currents, volcanic eruptions, shifts in the Earth’s magnetic field and the occasional meteorite encounter. None of these can be influenced by mankind. Of the man-made contributions the desertification of the Sahara by goat grazing (unlike sheep, goats graze down to the roots), deforestation, and water diversion (the Aral Sea is an example) are I believe far more important than the burning of fossil fuels. But none of the panic-mongers are obsessing about these. Why not?
The global Scamdemic taught everyone to ignore climate warnings and unlike the International Truant of the Year Miss Thumberg, I won’t be deleting this message EVER.
What is a “Global temperature”?——- Do government funded data adjusters just stick a thermometer under the earths tongue?—— So, what was the “global temperature” in 1920? How about 1840? What was it in 1630?——— Well they won’t know 1630 because that was 100 years before the thermometer was invented.——Let’s face it, the temperature record of earth is a total jumble of unreliable sparse thermometer readings, where thermometers were mainly in a few wealthy western countries, very few in poor countries, none in the oceans which is 70% of the planet, and out of all that clutter where they just guess what the temperature was if they have no data, we are expected to believe that some year was one hundredth of a degree warmer than some other year based on readings from non-existent thermometers that were never designed for those type of accuracies.————- United Nations people think if they stand at a podium with lots of world press and photographers and simply pronounce TRUTH that TRUTH has now been declared.— NOPE, truth cannot be pronounced. Truth needs evidence. This is the biggest pseudo scientific fraud ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public. Almost everything these people say is a smidgeon of the truth elevated into a planetary emergency with zero evidence. Everything that happens according to these people is “Not inconsistent with what we would expect in a warmer world”, which basically means everything that happens is caused by humans. This is NOT science. When what you say cannot be falsified it is NOT science. When impending doom relies almost entirely on the output from un-validated fanciful models that have so far been totally wrong then this is NOT science. It is “Official Science” which has simply been declared from a political body, not a scientific one called the IPCC, whose conclusions are all POLITICAL.
From the headline you might think that the most recent IPCC report claimed that temperatures were the highest for 125,000 years. I certainly couldn’t find it in the press release or the headline statements or the summary for policymakers (The full report has not been published yet).
However, the recent report is only a synthesis of what has been written in the the full reports by the working groups over the last couple of years. So perhaps Chris is referring back to one of these reports. There was a lot of press coverage when the working group 1 report came out two years ago saying that the temperature of the last 10 years was the hottest for the last 125,000 years. Oddly if you look at the working group report itself the only reference that I can find is buried in chapter 2 :
Taking all lines of evidence into account, the GMST averaged over the warmest centuries of the current interglacial period (sometime between around 6 and 7 ka) is estimated to have been 0.2°C–1.0°C higher than 1850–1900 (medium confidence). It is therefore more likely than not that no multi-centennial interval during the post-glacial period was warmer globally than the most recent decade (which was 1.1°C warmer than 1850–1900; Section 2.3.1.1.3);
This doesn’t seem to justify the press headlines at the time which seem to be derived not directly from the IPCC report but this article in Nature which unfortunately is behind an expensive pay wall.
In any case this is not such a remarkable claim. Most that time for the last 125,000 years we have been in an ice age. It’s only in the last 10,000 years that the current interglacial began. So to claim that this is the warmest for 125,000 years is equivalent to claiming it as the warmest. for the last 10,000 years. Also the IPCC claim is only that it is more likely than not the last decade has been warmer than any multi Centennial interval in the last 125,000 years. There may well have been decades in the last 125,000 years that were warmer and that would not be contradicted by this claim. It is more of an interesting observation not a world shattering claim and that is how the IPCC treats it (as opposed to how the press blew it up).
Chris also writes:
It is not difficult to see why the IPCC continues to claim current global temperatures are the highest for 125,000 years, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that shows this is untrue.
and later
The Daily Sceptic has reported on a number of science papers that track the higher temperatures in the past, in particular the period since the last ice age started to lift about 12,000 years ago. A sample can be read here, here and here. Earlier this year, a group of European scientists published a paper analysing tree remains that suggested there was a much warmer climate in the Alps during most of the last 10,000 years.
Have the IPCC simply been ignoring research that disproves their claim? Well we only have the references that Chris gives. One of them is about temperature spikes over the last 150 million years and not relevant. So there actually only three about temperatures in the last 10,000 years. They are about two specific areas: Northern China and the Alps. They are not about global average temperatures and make no attempt to draw conclusions about the global climate.
Some are getting rich and powerful from the Climate Change industry.
There is no global temperature with any physical significance. It is only a number calculated as an average. In order for an average to have a physical meaning there must be a total. Mass, length and volume can all be added to give a total. Temperatures cannot be added. Try mixing two cups of water at 50C and it will not result in boiling water. Temperature is an intensive variable meaning that they cannot be added, equally, taking water out of a cup will not reduce the temperature of the water remaining. With mass, taking some material away will reduce the mass that is left. It is basic physics, but how many people know about it? How easy it is to fool people into believing nonsense.
Search for a paper by Essex, McKitrick and Andresen written in 2006 called “Does a Global Temperature Exist?”. It has 24 pages explaining in some detail why it does not exist.