Fears are growing that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) could water down or even ditch its current finding that almost all types of extreme weather events have little or no sign of past human involvement, or any going forward to 2100.
The finding in its recent sixth assessment report is a major thorn in the side of alarmists since ‘extreme’ weather event attribution has recently risen to become the major scare tactic used to promote the Net Zero fantasy. The IPCC finding has been ignored and a large pseudoscience ‘attribution’ industry has been created within the Green Blob to feed improbable and uncheckable ‘scientists say’ stories into the mainstream. At a recent ‘scoping’ meeting to prepare for the IPCC’s seventh assessment report, the press release claimed, in direct contradiction of previous work, that a century of burning fossil fuels has resulted in “more frequent and more intense extreme weather events that have caused increasingly dangerous impacts”.
The position on not attributing bad weather directly to anthropogenic causes has been a great credit to the IPCC. It has often faced justifiable criticism in the past that it is a biased body highly selective in the science it highlights. Recent research from Clintel discovered that no less than 42% of its climate scenarios used worst-case ‘pathways’ of highly improbable temperature rises. Its ‘Summary for Policymakers’ (SPM) is a political document and has to be agreed by politicians from all 195 subscribing countries. Curiously, the IPCC assessment statement that the high-temperature pathway was of “low likelihood” was missing from the more widely-distributed SPM.
Nevertheless, the IPCC in its original 1998 remit is mandated with acting on an “objective, open and transparent basis” when investigating human-induced climate change. It is also established that its reports should be “neutral with respect to policy”. All the evidence points to these instructions being often ignored.
The distinguished science writer Roger Pielke Jr. sees clear dangers ahead noting the comments of the new IPCC Chair Professor Jim Skea at the recent COP 29 in Azerbaijan which he said focused entirely on advocacy. “I want to focus most of my remarks on the opportunities – and indeed the benefits – of near-term action. But first a few words on urgency,” said Skea. It is not within the IPCC’s mandate to call for action or implore urgency, observes Pielke. “There are plenty of groups who play that role. There is only one IPCC,” he added.
Of course it has long been observed that the original IPCC remit to investigate human-caused climate change leads inevitably to a slanted narrative. It was never on the cards that the IPCC would find humans had a negligible effect on the climate since its existence would be called into question. Twenty-five years later and an elite global political movement funded by almost unlimited subsidies has arisen to capture the commanding heights of economic and social life. It needs the IPCC onside, and the IPCC, and thousands of grant-hungry scientists, need it to survive.
Looked at in these terms, it is obvious that there will be pressure for the removal of the IPCC’s irritating statement that humans have not been causing much of the weather to get worse. The press release provides further clues about the possible future direction of travel. “Impacts are to intensify with every fraction of additional warming, particularly for the most vulnerable communities, accounting for 3.3-3.6 billion people.” Such precision in some scary numbers – where do they pull these figures from? For his part, Roger Pielke notes that the statement reads like “boilerplate from any garden-variety climate advocacy group, and not what one would expect from a leading international scientific assessment”.
Meanwhile, the attribution forces continue to grow. Professor Richard Betts, Head of Climate Impacts at the U.K. Met Office and recently appointed as a Special Adviser to the Climate Change Committee, recently said weather can only be attributed once all factors are considered and “human influence remains the only reasonable mechanism driving that change”. Just from these comments it might be understood why the IPCC has held back on attribution. Running a number of opinions about a chaotic, non-linear atmosphere full of complex natural variations through a computer model and concluding humans might be responsible is not science, it is pseudoscience since its findings cannot be checked or falsified.
Roger Pielke is particularly unimpressed with what he calls “weather attribution alchemy”. In his view, attribution science is a form of “tactical science”. Such science serves legal and political ends, and the work is “generally promoted via press release”. The IPCC itself has noted that the usefulness and applicability of available extreme weather attribution methods remain “subject to debate”. Unless scientists find a way to turn pseudoscientific opinion into scientific fact, it can only be hoped that the IPCC’s current stand against the attribution industry survives all the debate and political pressure in its forthcoming assessment review.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Whatever the IPCC may decide, big non Western countries (soon to be joined by the US) have no interest in prioritising emission reduction. As these countries (including the US) are the source of about 80% of global GHG emissions, emissions will continue to increase. And there’s nothing the rest of us can do about it.
No, no! Russia, China and India are fully signed up to Net Zero. Honest!
I’m sure xi Jinping signed any agreements asked of him.. and then walked away giggling
(As we ought to!)
The UN classifies India and China as ‘Developing Countries’ and therefore not part of the restrictions being demanded. The fact that the two biggest ‘poluters’ are effectively allowed to emit whatever they want, puts to bed that this is ‘scientific’ in any way. Climate Emergency, my arse…
Why wouldn’t they be “fully signed up to it” when they are absolutely aware that this entire hoax, from it’s inception, had been designed to destroy “the West”?
Statements are easy to find from Maurice Strong, Christiana Figueres, Otmar Edenhoffer and others, that IPPC’s aims have little to do with the Environment but rather to destroy Capitalism.
India and China are both “developing” countries who, despite space programmes and nuclear weapons, unashamedly hold out the old begging bowls!
All these people want is money, money and more money. At least the reasonable ones, ie not the Eat more plant-based fast food to save the planet!-faction.
But there’s so many silly brain washed naive virtue signalling idiots out there as well.
People can join, support and become active with ReformUK if they wish to do something to stop the Net Zero madness.
I think we can make a reasonable guess into which way this is going to go!
IPCC will become the global leaders in attribution, too much is at stake for the Alarmist narrative for it to be anything else!
Britain, as it follows the commands of Mad Ed Miliband will just become world leaders in economic suicide and societal collapse. And yes, we will win that race to the bottom, about the only race we can win!
But will the living standards of Miliband suffer?
This depends on how early he manages to get out of the country. Once the masses of global majority immigrants with scant – if any – command of English in London get cold and hungry, ie, start dying of starvation and hypothermia, they’ll find someone they will hold responsible for that. Hunger revolts ended Xi’s great Corona musical. They’ll also become the Ed stone marking Miliband’s final resting place.
This lot are running into a brick wall called reality, where governments such as ours are coming after ever greater tax takes and one of the causes, is their obsession with Nut Zero…..people then start asking questions and looking into the reasons and when they see the people/organisations behind this thinking are babbling bollox, rather than serious science…..but enjoying a very comfy lifestyle……they get very unhappy, very quickly……
Plus the IPCC may well be thinking we better start backing off, because President Trump is coming to town, to run a government that is also flat broke …but has a new governmental dept, whose job is to savagely cut expenditure, everywhere…….and who is the UN’s biggest contributor…yup the US……Good luck babbling scientific bollox to Musk….while flying all over the world, to wherever the next COP is, on a private jet, all on the US’s ticket.
No, IMO it’s much more sinister than that. They are aware the Global Warming narrative is stalling. So they now need to recognise the role of weather modification is playing so they can use it as an excuse. “Oh look at that, Gates projects to block out the sun is working and that’s why there’s been no global warming. But we still need the measures, it’s only being suppressed because of the measures we are taking and there can be no taking the foot of the accelerator.”
I fully expect we will see this very argument being made “by the other side” within the next year or so.
Anything that has to be agreed by 195 politicians will be useless, and wrong, just by the laws of human behaviour
Dear Humans Climate’s not your fault
Agreed but they will continue to constantly blame us all [especially if you are the “wrong” colour] for having the temerity to have been born and I am heartily sick of it.
If you go to the main IPCC website and look under “Reports” you will find that in the AR6 (Synthesis Report), under “Longer Report”, the main body of the report has been removed… All you get is “The file you are looking for cannot be found!!”
I’m guessing that was where this inconvenient morsel of sanity was to be sought and destroyed??
I noticed a recurring theme on Dews GB News when discussing the climate’; these days they seem to have two people in agreement on the climate, only disagreeing on how fast to drive off the cliff. But they both believe in MMCC. This is no different to the BBC. I sent them a bit of my mind calling them a disgrace etc.
They are captured. They are afraid.
So rain dances do work.
Here’s a challenge someone should pose to Professor Betts: Proove that you’re aware of all factors influencing the weather by accurately predicting the weather on next Saturday in a town of your chosing for the next 52 weeks.
Professor Betts doesn’t give a shit. If challenged, he quotes from the 100% political “Summary for Policy Makers”, even when this in flatly contradicted by the IPCC’s scientific findings.
The IPCC is a global warming activist group and nothing to do with science. They only look for human causes for global warming and ignore any inconvenient papers. They screech that everything must be peer reviewed while rushing to include convenient propaganda papers ahead of review. They include NGO propaganda as Donna LaFramboise showed in her book. And where else does a summary get published months before the report it summarises and when available shows all sorts of lies in the summary.
Remember that CO2 does not equal climate. It equals wealth. —–The countries who emit the most are the wealthiest for obvious reasons. China and India and other developing countries grow wealthier by using fossil fuels and therefore emitting more CO2.—-So remember the words of Edenhoffer of the IPCC who said “One has to free oneself from the illusion that climate policies are environmental policies anymore. We redistribute the worlds wealth by climate policy”.—-This is why Marxists like Miliband are so focussed on giving our money for the purposes of “Climate Justice”. They are globalists that believe in World Government where the wealth is spread out. —-Climate Change gives these people the ideal opportunity to indulge in this communism.
President Trump’s landslide win makes these zealots redundant. Nobody cares.
Weather is chaotic, climate is mathematically chaotic. Without any input from human’s, weather patterns and hence climate will change ie evolve without any attributable source other than where we are now is not where we’ve been before. Forcings can be identified but effects only attributable in the present as counter effects will then occur in the chaotic evolution eg sun gets hotter, more water evaporates and more clouds cause reduced warming might be a scenario.
If human input is then considered it will certainly change the evolution of the weather/climate system but how could one attribute a particular event or set of events or patterns to man made vs natural?
That assumes there is no catastropic event which breaks the system eg ateroid collision. Are the IPCC suggesting that man man made CO2 will cause a catastrophic break to the system? What?
How could a chaotic, evolved system be defined as a baseline against which human perturbations could be measured? The climate go forward baseline can’t be defined because it is chaotic. No matter how powerful a computer is used, the initial conditions can’t be defined precisely and calculated rounding errors will mean the calculated evolution will stray significantly from reality. That’s implicit in the definition of mathematical chaos.
Also change happens slowly and any evolving patterns can be mitigated as they start to embed. eg Sea level rise, build defences and new builds on higher ground. Don’t build on flood plains. Take advantage of changes both good and bad and don’t worry about their origin.
Build effective sustainable energy sources as technology evolves and natural resources eg hydrocarbons dwindle.
DON’T PANIC! And stop using climate to scare folk.
Only the Trump administration can stop this madness by throwing the Paris accord into the Seine. This climate cult scum needs to stop.