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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