By Andy May OMG! The world is going to end, and we caused it. This story, in one form or another, goes back to biblical times. According to Genesis (6:9 to 9:17) God decided that humans had sinned too much and must be punished, so he called up a great flood to destroy the world.…
By Andy May The following is a quote from my book Climate Catastrophe! Science or Science Fiction? “99.9 percent of the Earth’s surface heat capacity is in the oceans and less than 0.1 percent is in the atmosphere. Further, CO2 is only 0.04 percent of the atmosphere. It beggars belief that a trace gas (CO2),…
By Andy May This is the first of seven posts on the potential costs and hazards of human-caused global warming and the impact of humans on the environment in general. The IPCC WGII AR5 Technical Summary, defines “hazards” on page 39: “The potential occurrence of a natural or human-induced physical event or trend or physical…
Guest opinion: Dr. Tim Ball The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claim with 95 percent certainty that they completed a 5000-piece puzzle using only eleven pieces. The pieces are shown in the Radiative Forcing diagram (Figure 1) from AR5. By their assessment, they have high confidence in only five of these pieces. Those ratings…
Guest essay by David M Hoffer [Doug L. Hoffman] It is remarkable what gems of wisdom one can find simply by sitting down and reading the IPCC AR reports and seeing what they actually say. Having spent more time than I would like to admit on WGI (the science) over the years, I decided to…
Policycritic writes: You need to read this, Anthony. He dismantles the IPCC 2014 report for Congress. Botkin’s bio: “Daniel B. Botkin, a world-renowned ecologist, is Professor (Emeritus), Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology, UC Santa Barbara, and President of The Center for The Study of The Environment, which provides independent, science-based analyses of complex…
First, if you have not seen the Monty Python “dead parrot” sketch in your lifetime, before you read the satire from Christopher Monckton below, watch this video. Just click on the thumbnail at right. Now the following will make a bit more sense from the satire context. YMMV.
What is “the biggest single barrier to improving societal resilience to the vagaries of climate.”? In a News & Analysis item recently published in Science, Kintisch (2014) discusses the most recent IPCC report, noting it “is meant to be a practical guide to action,” especially in regard to what the report identifies as eight major…
Two scathing letters critical of the IPCC process were published on Friday April 25th; one from Dr. Robert Stavins, an IPCC chapter Co-Coordinating Lead Author, and a five year veteran of the process, plus another by Dr. Richard Tol, who asked his name to be removed from work he was contributing to because it was…
NOTE: This op-ed is apparently too hot for some editors to handle. Late last week it was accepted and posted on politix.topix.com only to be abruptly removed some two hours later. After several hours of attempting to determine why it was removed, I was informed the topix.com editor had permanently taken it down because of…
By Paul C. Knappenberger and Patrick J. Michaels Center for the Study of Science, Cato Institute Within the U.S. federal government (and governments around the world), the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is given authority when it comes to climate change opinion. This isn’t a good idea. Here perhaps is the clearest example…
UN report’s fatal flaws destroy credibility of WGII and WGIII findings Guest essay by Larry Hamlin The UN IPCC AR5 latest climate assessment process comprising WGI, WGII and WGIII reports is complete. This process includes many hundreds of authors and reviewers, consideration of thousands of papers and ten of thousands of pages of reports, associated…
UN IPCC WG report process fails to integrate critical information Guest essay by Larry Hamlin The world has experienced over the last 15+ years a remarkable absence of increasing global temperatures despite huge and growing increases in global CO2 emissions by the globes developing nations and despite claims by the UN IPCC that global temperature…
WGII climate risks overstated and invalid Guest essay by Larry Hamlin The UN IPCC AR5 WGII final climate report has been released. This UN WGII report attempts to evaluate various global risks associated with future climate change. The evaluation process utilized in the WGII report relies upon global temperature projections obtained from low and high…
This sentence… “One of the panel’s most striking new conclusions is that rising temperatures are already depressing crop yields, including those of corn and wheat. In the coming decades, farmers may not be able to grow enough food to meet the demands of the world’s growing population, it warns.” …is in this LA Times story…
The Working Group II IPCC report from the big shindig in Japan this week will be making headlines shortly, but take those headlines with a grain of salt. Richard Tol Pulls Out, Says IPCC Draft Report Alarmist Date: 27/03/14 Cheryl K. Chumley, The Washington Times One of the authors of a U.N. draft report on…
Guest essay by Roger A. Pielke Sr. Introduction I have posted in the past how the development of multi-decadal regional climate projections (predictions) to give to policymakers and the impact communities is a huge waste of time and resources; e.g. see The Huge Waste Of Research Money In Providing Multi-Decadal Climate Projections For The New…
Skeptics get a seat at the table. IPCC 5th Assessment Review Meeting starts at 9.30am GMT Witnesses Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, Grantham Institute, Imperial College London, Professor Myles Allen, University of Oxford University, and Dr Peter Stott, Met Office Professor Richard Lindzen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nicholas Lewis, Climate researcher, and Donna Laframboise, Author Live…
Who will believe the CMIP5 models, after the IPCC plenary had to discount their temperature projections? Guest essay by Barry Brill Table SPM.2 Projected change in global mean surface temperature (°C) for the mid- and late 21st century relative to the reference period of 1986-2005. From the IPCC AR5 Summary for Policy Makers Last August,…
Guest essay by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley Unnoticed, the IPCC has slashed its global-warming predictions, implicitly rejecting the models on which it once so heavily and imprudently relied. In the second draft of the Fifth Assessment Report it had broadly agreed with the models that the world will warm by 0.4 to 1.0 Cº from…
Guest post by David Middleton Experts say the IPCC underestimated future sea level rise A new study surveys 90 sea level rise experts, who say sea level rise this century will exceed IPCC projections Wednesday 4 December 2013 John Abraham It looks like past IPCC predictions of sea level rise were too conservative; things are…
We have been expecting too much from the IPCC about its confidence level increase: the explanation may actually be simple… and surprising. Guest essay by Stephane Rogeau Image: From IPCC FAQs Many people are wondering what actually made the IPCC raise its confidence level about the fact “human influence has been the dominant cause of…
Guest essay by Professor Philip Lloyd People have the nasty habit of giving their opponents names. Those who are convinced that humans are wrecking the world by burning fossil fuels call those who don’t believe them “denialists.” It implies that they are close to the Holocaust deniers, and so are clearly beyond the pale. I…
Guest essay by Douglas J. Keenan Temperatures on Earth’s surface—i.e. where people live—are widely believed to provide evidence for global warming. Demonstrating that those temperatures actually provide evidence, though, requires doing statistical analysis. All such statistical analyses of the temperatures that have been done so far are fatally flawed. Astoundingly, those flaws are effectively acknowledged…
Guest Essay by Dr. Norman Page 1.The Demise of the IPCC and the CAGW Delusion. a) Overview. In the AR5 Summary for Policymakers the IPCC glossed over the developing cooling trend in global temperatures and so lost the last vestige of its scientific credibility and any claim to be a source of useful guidance on future climate…
This is another post that illustrates and discusses just how poorly climate models simulate one of the most important climate variables: global surface temperatures. I’ve included a copy of this post in pdf format, linked at the end, for readers who would like to treat this post as a supplement to my ebook Climate Models…
Guest essay by Dr. Tim Ball Lack of temperature data is a problem, but measures of water and precipitation are much worse. Temperature changes, especially cooling, are important to a degree over the long term. Precipitation changes are much more important for short, medium and long periods. Droughts are much more devastating to flora, fauna…
Guest essay by Roger A. Pielke Sr. Main Points 1. The difference in ocean heat content at two different time periods provides the global average radiative imbalance over that time [within the uncertainty of the ocean heat measurements] 2. This global average radiative imbalance is equal to the sum of the global average radiative forcings…
The new RCPs are not projections, probabilities, prophecies or pathways – they might possibly be potentialities. Guest essay by Barry Brill The IPCC begins with science: “In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore…
(PDF of this report also available below) by Craig D. Idso, Robert M. Carter, S. Fred Singer, and Willie Soon* Introduction The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a final version of the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of its Fifth Assessment Report on September 27, 2013. It differs in important ways from…
Noble cause corruption in the process. Guest essay by Dr. Tim Ball Someone said economists try to predict the tide by measuring one wave. The IPCC essentially try to predict (project) the global temperature by measuring one variable. The IPCC compound their problems by projecting the temperature variable with the influence of the economic variable.…
From The End is Near department comes this video documentary from lefty talk radio guy Thom Hartmann that claims we are on the verge of a “mass extinction” due to climate change. Only one problem; the IPCC says “no” to his scenario. Ooops. From the YouTube description, bold mine: “Last Hours” is the first in…
FYI. Some email correspondence in my Inbox, for those with an interest in an alternate viewpoint of the IPCC: ========================================================== At 10 AM PDT Tomorrow, Sunday, October 13th, you can watch a half hour program on KUSI TV via internet streaming at KUSI.COM. The featured guests are the Dean of Global Warming Skeptics, Dr. Fred…
Dave Burton writes: Anthony, The IPCC replied promptly to my inquiry (below), and they surprised me, twice: 1. They say that the just released “final” draft of the AR5 WG1 Report isn’t really final after all, but the Summary for Policy Makers is final; and 2. They say the “underlying chapters” may be revised for…
Guest Post by Ira Glickstein I just updated my December 2012 IPCC “Arrows” animation based on the latest available IPCC AR5 (2013) Global Warming prediction for 2035. One good result is that the midpoint of the AR5 prediction range for 2035 is LOWER than the corresponding predictions for three out of the four previous Assessment…
In the post Is Ocean Heat Content Data All It’s Stacked Up to Be? I explained all of the problems associated with Ocean Heat Content data, in great detail. For that post, I created three gif animations that showed where temperature measurements were taken at three different depths. The intent of the animations was to…
Guest essay by Dr. Richard Lindzen Each IPCC report seems to be required to conclude that the case for an international agreement to curb carbon dioxide has grown stronger. That is to say the IPCC report (and especially the press release accompanying the summary) is a political document, and as George Orwell noted, political language…
By Tom Quirk The IPCC use of computer models to predict temperatures, rain fall, sea level rises and other weather related events either global or regional has comprehensively failed to predict most of the observations made in the last twenty years and ignores any analysis that suggests natural variability as the main driver of climate.…
UPDATE: I’ve added a comment to the end of the post about the use of 1990 as the start year. # # # After an initial look at how the IPCC elected to show their model-data comparison of global surface temperatures in Chapter 1, we’ll look at the CMIP5 models a couple of different ways.…
Guest essay by Dr. Don J. Easterbrook, Professor of Geology, Western Washington University Mark Twain popularized the saying “There are liars, damn liars, and statisticians.” After reading the recently-released [IPCC AR5] report, we can now add, ‘there are liars, damn liars, and IPCC.” When compared to the also recently published NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on…
‘Abrupt Climate Change’ may turn out to be an IPCC own goal Guest essay by Barry Brill It’s one thing to terrify the populace with apocalyptic rhetoric and images of collapsing ice sheets or tsunamis. It’s quite another to gain ratification of a treaty obligation imposing huge costs on both the future economy and the…
Andrew Montford at Bishop Hill recently posted links to the AR5 second order draft materials and comments dated March 28th, 2013. With those available it allows us to begin constructing a timeline of how the finalized documents were hammered out. One of the first things I noticed, was that the temperature projections to the end…
Tom Nelson points this out – IPCC sausage-making details: Saudi Arabia cautioned against “giving policy makers the message that CO2 drives global warming” Summary of the Twelfth Session of the IPCC WGI and IPCC-36, 23-26 September 2013, Stockholm, Sweden Saudi Arabia proposed clarifying that evidence of future climate change is based on models and simulations…
Fixing the Facts – By Steve McIntyre Figure 1.4 of the Second Order Draft clearly showed the discrepancy between models and observations, though IPCC’s covering text reported otherwise. I discussed this in a post leading up to the IPCC Report, citing Ross McKitrick’s article in National Post and Reiner Grundmann’s post at Klimazweiberl. Needless to…
Patrick Carlberg writes: I can’t assess the validity of the values from the climate models presented in AR5 (mostly due to lack of time). But I can tell you there are tricks used in the way they interpret the statistical inference. One of the key points in the new IPCC report is that the CO2…
(Personal note – apologies for the light posting today, I’m overwhelmed with work, and exhausted from overwork – Anthony) The IPCC AR5 falls flat Dr. Judith Curry has been making some heavy hitting commentary, we’ll lead with some of those: IPCC’s pause ‘logic’ Well here it is, the pause discussion is buried in Box 9.2 of…
From the IPCC website: Final Draft Note The Final Draft Report, dated 7 June 2013, of the Working Group I contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis was accepted but not approved in detail by the Twelfth Session of Working Group I and the Thirty-Sixth Session of the…
September 30, 2013 The Honorable John Kerry Secretary of State Washington D.C. 20520 Dear Mr. Secretary: Your press release dated September 27, 2013 Release of the Fifth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change clearly expresses your beliefs about climate science. It included: This isn’t a run of the mill report to be dumped…
IPCC has never waited for 30-year trends, and they were right. Guest essay by Barry Brill Under pressure at a media conference following release of its Summary for Policymakers, AR5 WG1 Co-Chair Thomas Stocker is reported to have said that “climate trends should not be considered for periods less than 30 years”. Some have seen…