The credibility of the disaster-addicted Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been dealt a damaging blow with recently-published research showing that 42% of its climate scenarios rely on improbable rises in future temperature that even the UN-funded body believes are of “low likelihood”. The research notes the IPCC admission of improbability is “deeply buried” in the full Sixth Assessment Reports (AR6), and is “unlikely to be read by the policy makers”. The authors note that significant and important sections of the full IPCC work emphasise these improbable claims, “potentially invalidating those sections of the report”.
Climate and emissions outline SSP5-8.5 assumes a rise of around 5°C by the end of the century. It was always somewhat detached from reality and has long been dealt a death blow, given that global warming ran out of steam about 25 years ago. Even the climate alarmist Zeke Hausfather is unimpressed, and his comments can be seen on the right of the graph below. Leaving aside the small natural boost from a very powerful EL Niño oscillation around 2016, warming is little more than 0.1°C over two decades. Nevertheless, SSP5-8.5 gives credence to 42% of the IPCC’s work in AR6.
The authors are damning about much of the IPCC’s work. In addition to emphasising worst-case scenarios, it rewrites climate history, has a “huge bias” in favour of bad news against good news, and keeps the good news out of its widely-distributed Summary for Policymakers (SPM). One notable contradiction surrounds flooding, where the AR6 IPCC report states with “low confidence” that humans have contributed to it, yet the Summary for Policymakers promotes the opposite, stating that human influence has increased “compound” flooding.
There have long been concerns about SPMs, which are written by Government officials and need to be agreed by all the political parties involved. Last year, the retired physicist Dr. Ralph Alexander wrote an illuminating paper that showed how science in the IPCC reports was twisted to fit a political narrative through the accompanying SPM. Further spin was then added to press releases, which are duly reported as fact by incurious mainstream media.
Climate ‘reparations’ are currently being whipped up as a major political issue. In 2020, a review article was published which showed that 52 out of 53 peer-reviewed papers dealing with ‘normalised disaster losses’ saw no increase in harms that could be attributed to climate change. The IPCC is said to have highlighted the single paper that claimed an increase in losses. In the view of the authors, that paper is flawed, “but its cherry-picking by the IPCC suggests it found its conclusions irresistible”.
The critical report is a substantial and forensic examination of the ‘settled’ science handed down from the UN, and is titled The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC. Running to 180 pages, it is written by some of the world’s leading climate scientists, and is published by the Clintel Foundation. The work examines the recently completed AR6 project, which comprises three working party reports, a synthesis and various SPMs. Last year, Clintel’s World Climate Declaration, signed by many scientists led by the Nobel physics laureate Professor Ivar Giaever, attracted an enormous audience on social media, with its declaration that there is no climate emergency. The Declaration states that climate science has degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs, not on sound, self-critical science.
Are we at a fork in the road, ask two of the authors of the report. Will the UN, the IPCC and politicians finally realise that their 50-year old anthropogenic warming hypothesis is out of date, and incorporate the new natural warming forces discovered in the past 30 years into their work and projections? The current lack of certainty about the effect of a number of gases in the atmosphere is said to be just as uncertain as it was in 1979. It is a sign that the hypothesis is missing a major component or process.
A notorious claim made by the IPCC is that “global temperatures are more likely than not unprecedented in the past 125,000 years”. This statement obliterates the Holocene Thermal Maximum from around 9,800-5,700 years ago, where there is substantial evidence that temperatures were often higher than the present in many parts of the world. The IPCC claims that current warming is unprecedented in the last 2,000 or even 125,000 years “are very unconvincing to say the least”, say the authors. In this case, the IPCC seems to act like George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth by rewriting Earth’s climate history.
On sea rises, there is obvious suspicion about the conclusions reached and promoted in increasingly alarmist tones around the world. AR6 states sea level rise is accelerating, but “the evidence for this is rather thin”. Tide gauge readings are said to show “remarkably linear behaviour for more than a century”. It is said that the IPCC conflates its recent “acceleration” with multidecadal variability, notably the effect of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. This should become clear in the next 20 years, and it is “preliminary to claim there is an acceleration in sea level rise”. Al ‘boiling oceans’ Gore is a noted IPCC hysteric helped by the suggestion of a 500 zettajoules rise in ocean heat content since the turn of the 19th century. The ocean has warmed a little since that time as the Earth rebounded from the little ice age. The 500 zettajoules is a change of 0.03% in the global ocean energy content. “The IPCC avoided giving this important background information,” the authors observe.
They conclude that most of the recent reports published by the IPCC have “continued to deteriorate in quality and increase in bias with time, as is evident to anyone who has read all of them”. No honest assessment of AR6 would conclude it is fair and unbiased – quite the opposite, they add.
This remarkable report contains a wealth of climate science, most of which has been hidden by mainstream academia and media. It is likely to add to the growing debate about the political role now played by the IPCC operation in promoting the collectivist Net Zero agenda. The ramping up of extreme climate projections is accepted without question by most media. Without a climate crisis, there is no legitimacy for political change. The climate scientist Dr. Judith Curry recently noted that UN climate panic, “is more politics than science“. The absence of evidence has been supplanted by computer models laughably attributing individual weather events to human-caused climate change. As the Clintel report shows, improbable scenarios forecasting fanciful rises in near-term temperature are fiercely clung to, although nobody really believes in them anymore.
But then it is not really about science anymore, is it? Recently the Guardian ran a long article by its U.S. correspondent Rebecca Solnit called for winning the popular imagination by providing new stories on climate. What she called ‘climate denial’ has been combated by tales of ‘climate-driven catastrophes’ promoted by activists and journalists. According to Solnit, recognising the reality of climate breakdown means limiting the freedom of the individual, “in the name of the wellbeing of the collective”.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.