The political role played by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in fomenting climate and ecological panic to push through a collectivist Net Zero project is starting to attract general and widespread sceptical debate. In recent years, every IPCC climate utterance has sought to ramp up alarm and push the unproven hypothesis that humans are causing the climate to heat up by burning fossil fuel. The recently published Synthesis Report, which compiles IPCC findings from the last five years, was full of extreme projections, most of them produced by computer models. The distinguished climatologist Dr. Judith Curry is unimpressed and notes that UN climate panic “is more politics than science”.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the current climate narrative is firmly embedded in most mainstream scientific models, as well as the Net Zero business plan. As Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen is fond of noting, the current climate narrative is “absurd”, but trillions of dollars says it’s not absurd. Curry notes that the IPCC reports have become “bumper sticker” climate science – “making a political statement, while using the overall reputation of science to give authority to a politically manufactured consensus”.
In addition, as the Daily Sceptic noted last week, the IPCC is rapidly descending into wokedom. The Daily Caller counted 31 variations of the words ‘equity’ and ‘inequality’ in the 36-page Synthesis Report. Variations of ‘inclusive’ and ‘inclusion’ appear 17 times, and there are mentions of colonialism and social justice. A recent set of published minutes for a major IPCC meeting last October was liberally sprinkled with the need to solicit ‘scientific’ input based on identity, gender and age.
Curry notes that the IPCC reports include some good material, but the accompanying Summary for Policymakers (SPM) for the Synthesis “emphasises weakly justified findings on climate impacts driven by extreme emission scenarios, and politicised policy recommendations on emissions reductions”.
What has happened is quite simple to understand. Global warming has run out of steam, while a 40-year climate model history of over-predicting temperature rises is becoming increasingly embarrassing. As a result, extreme carbon dioxide emission scenarios are no longer justified. Curry reports that scenarios known as RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 which forecast global rises of 4-5°C degrees within less than 80 years have been quietly dropped. They are now “recognised as implausible”. But most of the extreme responses – as well as the pulpit fulminations from hysterics such as Al ‘Rain Bombs’ Gore and UN Secretary-General Antonio ‘Highway to Climate Hell’ Guterres – are based on these predictions.
Both scenarios have been removed from the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Climate Agreement, but, notes Curry, the new Synthesis Report continues to emphasise these extreme scenarios, while burying in a footnote the caveat that “very high emission scenarios have become less likely but cannot be ruled out”. The reduction in temperature projections is huge since it cuts the figure by two thirds. “Rejecting these extreme scenarios has rendered obsolete much of the climate literature and assessments of the past decade,” concludes Curry.
In other words, some of the scientists have moved on, but the activists and government officials who write the headline summary reports have not. The cynic might ask, why would they? A hard left economic and societal transformation via the command-and-control Net Zero project is a prize they will not willingly give up.
Curry adds: “Clearly the climate ‘crisis’ isn’t what it used to be. Rather than acknowledge this fact as good news, the IPCC and UN officials are doubling down on the alarm regarding the urgency of reducing emissions by eliminating fossil fuel. You might think that if warming is less than we thought, then the priorities would shift away from emission reductions and towards reducing our vulnerability to weather and climate extremes. However, that hasn’t been the case. … With its explicit political advocacy, combined with misleading information, the IPCC risks losing its privileged position in international policy debates.”
The capture of large parts of the IPCC by political activists has been evident for some time. Many within the UN don’t even bother to hide the control that is exerted to ensure just one doomsday climate message is presented to the wider public. Last year its Under-Secretary for Global Communications, Melissa Fleming, told delegates at a World Economic Forum disinformation seminar that we “own” climate science – and she thinks the world should know it.
Last year, the retired physicist Dr. Ralph Alexander wrote an illuminating paper that showed how science in the IPCC reports is twisted to fit a political narrative through the accompanying SPM. Further spin is then applied to press releases which are duly reported as fact by an obedient media. The progression from the initial IPCC report to press release provided “ample opportunities” for the message to be distorted “either wilfully or not”.
An SPM produced last year revived the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph showing little global warming over 2,000 years, followed by a sudden and dramatic uptick over the last 150 years. The hockey stick first appeared in the third IPCC assessment in 2001, but was omitted from subsequent work. It was the creation of the IPCC author Michael Mann, and was widely debunked since it ignored the higher temperatures in the medieval warming period and subsequent cooling in the little ice age.
Alexander noted that Figure 1 above showed clearly how the IPCC’s science can be lost in translation. Figure 1 did not appear in the body of the full IPCC AR6 report. But it is presented in the SPM which was said to be a more concise guide to the full report. Meanwhile, the accompanying press release claimed many recent changes in the climate were unprecedented over thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years. Alexander noted that there was no justification for calling changes unprecedented – the press release had “no basis” in either the AR6 report or the SPM, he said.
For her part, Curry concludes that the IPCC has increasingly taken on a stance of “explicit political advocacy”, but is misleading policymakers with its emphasis on extreme climate outcomes driven by implausible extreme emissions scenarios.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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“For her part, Curry concludes that the IPCC has increasingly taken on a stance of “explicit political advocacy”, but is misleading policymakers with its emphasis on extreme climate outcomes driven by implausible extreme emissions scenarios.”
The only thing Judith Curry might be slightly off-the-mark with. The IPCC are giving policy makers exactly what they’re paying for, with other people’s money:
I’m sure other commenters could think of more.
Nicely said. But from the depths of the West Country I’d always understood the dinner parties were a North London thing?!
Perhaps not so much any more – Richmond and Chiswick seem to be centres for the wealthy enlightened these days. It seems much of London is owned by foreign oligarchs and left empty these days anyway.
Well done. great comment.
Thank you.
What chance though that our ranting about the climate fraud will make the slightest difference. —-Your comment received only 68 thumbs up from readers who are all pretty much in agreement about this issue and my comment received only 6. —Somehow we need to get the information in articles like this on mainstream TV. But the MSM have it all sown up with the “Official Science” narrative. ——-It does not even appear on GB News, so what hope is there that the general public will ever see a different set of facts? ———Maybe NO HOPE. —–NET ZERO is getting a free run.
What happened to global warming?
It was all the rage a few years back…..the hot summer of 2006 was peppered with headlines about how all summers forthwith would be hot cos of global warming, all completely forgotten after the washout summer of 2007!
Then of course the ‘new ice age’ which was heavily promoted when I was at school on the sixties seems to have disappeared forever…..I must be a conspiracy theorist…..
Its one of those subjects that has captured people by their good intentions, like the TV adverts for the welfare of Donkeys, or the ones where concerned middle class women are portrayed as being outraged about FGM, although they support surgical transitioning in 15 year olds, mastectomies and castrations in kids, or who ‘Can’t believe this is happening to young girls, when far worse has been happening to young girls just a few miles from their homes in terms of grooming gangs. It tickles the right bit of the ‘saviour complex’ in all of us.
very high emission scenarios have become less likely but cannot be ruled out
And there it is again, our old friend, the appeal to ignorance: We don’t know the future for certain, therefore we must … This footnote is entirely sufficient to discredit the whole text.
What are the odds that an organization called the International Panel on Climate Change would ever discover that there’s no problem with climate change? Subzero, I’d imagine.
Richard Tol a ‘scientist’ and one of the most quoted authors within IPCC reports, stated that making the IPCC document was like making a sausage by committee. He wrote that the room where the work occurred had a handful of ‘scientists’ but a huge group of politicians. I remembered he wrote that the ‘experts’ were outnumbered 5 or 10 : 1 by the greasy corrupt slime called politicians. That is all we need to know about the veracity of their claims.
“scenarios known as RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 which forecast global rises of 4-5°C degrees within less than 80 years have been quietly dropped.”
I think I read somewhere that the then Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance bamboozled a groggy Boris Johnson with RCP 8.5 before the PM went up to Glasgow to warn of the deadly tea cosy of CO2 and chose to destroy our car industry. Sigh.
If these Climate Scare Charlatans have the skill to state that a particular dangerous weather event happened because of manmade climate change then they must have the skill to identify dangerous weather events that didn’t happen because of manmade climate change. Something not happenning is a weather event in itself.
BBC————-Are you Listening? ———SKY NEWS and your Climate Show, are you listening?————-Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Humza Yousaf and all the other United Nations Lackeys that are involved in this Eco Socialist SCAM,————- are you listening? ——“Extinction Rebellion”, “Just Stop Oil” and all you other brainwashed Dreamers——are you listening? ———You are all a total fraud, and it did not take this article by Chris Morrison for anyone who has not just switched on their 6 o’clock News for the past 20 years and simply swallowed this propaganda down with their mince and potatoes to know it.——- Many contributors on this website, myself included have known about this pseudo scientific fraud since we first got interested in it after seeing Martin Durkin’s “The Great Global Warming Swindle” back in 2007. —-Since then I have observed this scam unfold and have read maybe 200 books including “Watermelons”, James Dellingpole.– “Hubris”, Michael Hart.—— “Energy and Climate Wars”, Glover and Economides.—-“Taken by Storm”, Christopher Essex and Ross McKitrick.—-“Apocalypse Never”, Michael Shellenberger. Plus the work of Lindzen, Judith Curry, Roy Spencer, Ross Clark, Alex Epstein, Marc Morano, the wonderful Watts Up With That website and on and on and on.————– I thank all of these people for their fantastic exposure of the “Official science” in support of this scam. —-PS. I am currently reading “Myths, Widely Held but False Beliefs in the Climate Change Crisis” Iain Aitken, which is turning out to be very a very extensive piece of work. ——-Oh, and ofcourse thanks also to Chris Morrison for the work you are doing on The Daily Sceptic.
The Climate Change industry is very lucrative, with a lot of power and control, and they won’t give it up easily.
It is all very well having this great article and others on this site. Sceptic readers get to post and have their little rant about the climate scam. (me included quite often) But it isn’t Daily Sceptic readers that we need to convince that climate change is all politics masquerading as science. It is the general public who are all drunk on climate misinformation. For these people what is required is a bit of rehab. ——I would like to see another Martin Durkin type of film on mainstream media that gives not just the black, but the black and white. For climate change is not a black and white issue and there is the other side that we NEVER see on BBC or SKY NEWS who have simply become climate activists promoting a particular world view in support of the globalist politics of Sustainable Development. ——-An extensive documentary to expose this scam for what it is with contributions from many of the main players that question all of the “official science” would be very welcome. But it would ofcourse have stiff opposition and spitting fury from the Eco Socialists in government and NGO’s.—— Because let us remember that when it comes to science, “Scepticism is the highest calling and blind faith the one unpardonable sin”———It is very peculiar how people will question their government on all manner of issues and often do not believe a word they say, yet on this issue the blindly follow the lemmings over the cliff and question nothing. ——-Such is the power of propaganda.