Ipcc Quotes

the IPCC asserts against all evidence that the sun has little influence on climate change. This represents neither a consensus nor an authoritative review of the subject.

unfortunately, with the paper’s extensive criticisms of IPCC, there was no realistic chance of publishing it in a regular scientific journal—most of the likely referees for the paper were contributing authors of IPCC.

if you go through the multi-thousand-page IPCC synthesis reports, you will not find any quantification of climate-related disaster deaths. And if you review the world’s leading source of climate disaster data, you will find that it totally contradicts the moral case for eliminating fossil fuels. Climate-related disaster deaths have plummeted by 98 percent over the last century, as CO2 levels have risen from 280 ppm (parts per million) to 420 ppm (parts per million) and temperatures have risen by 1°C.[6]

Whatever the IPCC’s motives for omitting the fact of plummeting climate-related disaster deaths, one thing is certain: when the world’s most influential synthesizing institution does not include a crucial variable, what we are told the “experts” think is inevitably and significantly distorted.

The difference between the long-term average of the graph and the ice age, 12,000 years ago, is just over 3°C. The IPCC 2001 report suggests that the line of the hockey stick graph might rise a further 5°C during this century. This is about twice as much as the temperature change from the ice age to pre-industrial times.

The many, many thousands of pages of the Assessment Reports of the UN’s climate panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are the expression of the beliefs of a small circle of scientists and interested lobbyists who, against all evidence, have convinced themselves that humans are having a dramatic effect on the Earth’s climate.

We are told that we are sinning (by emitting CO2), that we have original sin (human greed), which has banished us from Eden (the pre-industrial world), for which we must confess (by condemning irresponsible consumerism), atone (by paying carbon taxes), repent (insisting that politicians pay lip service to climate-change alarm), and seek salvation (sustainability). The wealthy can buy indulgences (carbon offsets) so as to keep flying their private jets, but none must depart from faith (in carbon dioxide) as set out in scripture (the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). It is the duty of all to condemn heretics (the ‘deniers’), venerate saints (Al Gore), heed the prophets (of the IPCC). If we do not, then surely Judgement Day will find us out (with irreversible tipping points), when we will feel the fires of hell (future heatwaves) and experience divine wrath (worsening storms). Fortunately, God has sent us a sign of the sacrifice we must make – I have sometimes been struck by the way a wind farm looks like Golgotha.

Smade’s patrons were diverse: explorers, locaters, Jarnell technicians, private agents in search of lost men or stolen treasure, more rarely an IPCC representative, or “weasel”, in the argot of the Beyond. Others were folk more dire, and these were of as many sorts as there were crimes to be named. Making a virtue of necessity, Smade presented the same face to all.

For instance, there is a broad consensus that there has been greater hurricane activity in the North Atlantic since 1970. However, there is also a broad consensus that the increase since 1970 falls within the variability observed in North Atlantic hurricanes observed since 1900.[51] Thus, “climate change” as defined by the IPCC has not been detected with respect to hurricanes.

A few weeks after the Climategate emails were released, Dr Sprigg spoke at the 13th Energy & Environment Expo in Phoenix177: Focusing closely on the Climategate scandal, in which leaked emails revealed IPCC gatekeepers hid, manipulated, and destroyed scientific data that contradicted claims of substantial human-induced global warming, Sprigg said the scandal has harmed the movement’s scientific credibility.

The central lesson to be learned from this episode in scientific history is that to create an organisation financially and ideologically dependent upon coming to a single, aprioristic viewpoint, regardless of the objective truth, is to create a monster that ignores the truth. Regrettably, the cumulative effect of the IPCC’s conduct over the last 25 years has inflicted severe and long-term damage on the reputation of science and of scientists everywhere.

The implication is that the models generally agree. But that isn’t at all the case. Comparisons among models within any of these ensembles show that, on the scales required to measure the climate’s response to human influences, model results differ dramatically both from each other and from observations. But you wouldn’t know that unless you read deep into the IPCC report. Only then would you discover that the results being presented are “averaging” models that disagree wildly with each other.

Certainly the concept that human CO2 causes warming and climate change was based on unproven theory used by people with an ideology. They used instruments of state to dominate the science. They also attacked and abused anyone who dared to pursue proper science. The small group who controlled the IPCC were unlikely to change their tune. A pattern that was borne out by the release of IPCC Report AR5 in September 2013, which denied the fact that for 17 years global temperature declined slightly while CO2 levels continued to increase.

Since 1980, the planet has experienced a fiftyfold increase in the number of dangerous heat waves; a bigger increase is to come. The five warmest summers in Europe since 1500 have all occurred since 2002, and eventually, the IPCC warns, simply working outdoors at that time of year will be unhealthy for parts of the globe. Even if we meet the Paris goals, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will annually encounter deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015, when heat killed thousands in India and Pakistan. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. Then, it was one of the worst weather events in Continental history, killing 35,000 Europeans, including 14,000 French; perversely, the infirm fared relatively well, William Langewiesche has written, most of them watched over in the nursing homes and hospitals of those well-off countries, and it was the comparatively healthy elderly who accounted for most of the dead, many left behind by vacationing families escaping the heat, with some corpses rotting for weeks before the families returned.

think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast. We think of the technological change necessary to avert it as fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow—especially judged by just how soon we need it. This is what Bill McKibben means when he says that winning slowly is the same as losing: “If we don’t act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble,” he writes. “The decisions we make in 2075 won’t matter.” Innovation, in many cases, is the easy part. This is what the novelist William Gibson meant when he said, “The future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.” Gadgets like the iPhone, talismanic for technologists, give a false picture of the pace of adaptation. To a wealthy American or Swede or Japanese, the market penetration may seem total, but more than a decade after its introduction, the device is used by less than 10 percent of the world; for all smartphones, even the “cheap” ones, the number is somewhere between a quarter and a third. Define the technology in even more basic terms, as “cell phones” or “the internet,” and you get a timeline to global saturation of at least decades—of which we have two or three, in which to completely eliminate carbon emissions, planetwide. According to the IPCC, we have just twelve years to cut them in half. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year. This is why U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started. The scale of the technological transformation required dwarfs any achievement that has emerged from Silicon Valley—in fact dwarfs every technological revolution ever engineered in human history, including electricity and telecommunications and even the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago. It dwarfs them by definition, because it contains all of them—every single one needs to be replaced at the root, since every single one breathes on carbon, like a ventilator.

First, as a branch of the United Nations, the IPCC is itself an intensely political and not a scientific body. As its chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri observed in an interview with the Guardian newspaper: We are an intergovernmental body and we do what the governments of the world want us to do. If the governments decide we should do things differently and come up with a vastly different set of products we would be at their beck and call.10 To boot, the IPCC charter requires that the organisation investigates not climate change in the round, but solely global warming caused by human greenhouse emissions, a blinkered approach that consistently damages all IPCC pronouncements.

the IPCC has been practicing ‘para-science’ in that, while it affects the appearance of practicing science, it has violated longheld scientific norms and practices of fully and accurately representing the current state of scientific knowledge, and of proposing and testing alternative hypotheses in order to extend knowledge.33 Instead, the IPCC and its authors have acted out of prejudice in a manner that has misled both politicians and a largely unsuspecting public. As a redress, I have spelled out here several of the IPCC’s numerous, specific and grievous errors in science. Each error has the effect of minimising the role of the sun and thereby supporting the IPCC’s unsupportable claim to be ‘95 per cent confident’ that most of the 0.7°C global warming since 1950 was manmade. That assertion is made without evidence. The assertion is also self-serving, in that the IPCC depends on it for its own continued existence.

Even the most recent IPCC report, dire as it is, spells out solutions of a sort. There are ways to mitigate things, there are ways to fix them. Ban fossil fuels. Stop eating meat and dairy; according to an IPCC report from 2014, animal agriculture contributes at least as much to global greenhouse gas emissions as the combined exhaust of all the world’s vehicles. What’s that you say? Too difficult? Can’t switch to an oil-free economy overnight? Okay, here’s something that’s effective, simple, and as convenient as a visit to the nearest outpatient clinic: stop breeding. Every child you squeeze out is a Godzilla-sized carbon bootprint stretching into the future—and after all, isn’t 7.6 billion of us enough? Are your genes really that special? If even half the men on the planet got vasectomies, I bet we could buy ourselves a century—and as an added bonus, child-free people not only tend to have higher disposable income than the sprogged, they’re also statistically happier.

The IPCC explicitly addressed—and rejected—the Marshall Institute argument for blaming the Sun. The upper limits on solar variability, they explained, are “small compared with greenhouse forcing and even if such a change occurred over the next few decades, it would be swamped by the enhanced greenhouse effect.”75

The IPCC had clearly stated that the unrestricted fossil fuel use would produce a “rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century of about .3 C per decade; this is greater than that seen over the past 10,000 years.”86 Singer rejected this, asserting instead that “the scientific base for [greenhouse warming] includes some facts, lots of uncertainty, and just plain ignorance.” He concluded emphatically, “The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.”87 This, of course, was precisely what he had said about acid rain. And ozone depletion. It was easy to see why many working scientists didn’t like Fred Singer.

right-wing, Exxon-funded Washington think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, jumped forward to offer scientists $10,000 awards (plus travel expenses and additional payments) to refute the IPCC report.

the UN IPCC AR3 actually made the following admission:206   In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.   So the IPCC agrees that climate is a “coupled, non-linear chaotic system” and “therefore that long term prediction of future climate states is not possible.” I regard this official statement by the IPCC as devastating but entirely appropriate. The climate system is chaotic and multivariate. So although climate is deterministic it is not determinable.

In late-2006, the most publicised government-commissioned report on the economics of climate change was released. Soon to be widely known as the Stern Review, the report concluded that it would be necessary to invest at least one per cent of Gross World Product (GWP) every year to avoid climate change damage costs equivalent to the annual loss of 5–20 per cent of GWP (Stern 2007). The Stern conclusions were soon supported in 2007 with the publication of the fourth series of IPCC reports declaring that the cost of reducing emissions would be significantly less than the cost of climate change damages (IPCC 2007a). Also stressed by the IPCC was that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and that it was “very likely that global warming is the result of human activities

IPCC’s so-called science is based upon IPCC’s environmental-cult view that nature is “good,” and human is “bad.” That is not physics.

The IPCC is a political organization, not a scientific organization.

Who made these changes to the chapter? Who authorized these changes? Why were they made?” Pearlman demanded. “Pearlman got up and in my face, turned beet red and [started] screaming at me,” Santer recalls. AMS officer Anthony Socci “finally separated us, but Pearlman kept following me around.”142 Santer explained that he’d been required by IPCC procedures to make the changes in response to the government comments and discussions at Madrid, and the chapter had never been out of his control, but the truth did not satisfy the opposition.143

The IPCC report explains that every single metric ton of carbon dioxide we prevent from entering the atmosphere lessens the severity of the impacts we bake into the system. Our assessment meticulously describes how every fraction of a degree of warming matters—the scale and severity of impacts begin to compound and cascade with higher levels of warming.

Unfortunately, one of the planet’s most biodiverse and important ecosystems will not survive two degrees intact. The science on corals and global warming has got steadily more alarming over recent years, in tandem with the accelerated destruction of reefs by rapidly rising temperatures around the world’s tropical coastlines, as has already been described. In 2018 the IPCC had to admit that ‘tropical corals may be even more vulnerable to climate change than indicated in assessments made in 2014.’ Marine biologists watched in horror as the Great Barrier Reef suffered back-to-back bleaching events in 2016 and 2017, losing fully half its coral cover in the process. The IPCC’s latest predictions for the two-degree world are dire: even if global temperatures stay under 1.5 degrees, 70–90% of reef-building corals will be lost. With two degrees of warming, this increases to 99%.

·        Rather than rely exclusively on IPCC for scientific advice, policymakers should seek out advice from independent, nongovernment organizations and scientists who are free of financial and political conflicts of interest.

Every single catastrophic scenario considered by the IPCC AR5 has a rating of very unlikely or exceptionally unlikely and/or has low confidence.

How is Science Governed? We have already seen how the changing nature of science, and its changing relationship with society, has left Polanyi’s self-governing republic of science somewhat defenceless. The boundaries of science have become more porous even if, in the heartland of the republic, the norms and practices of expert peer-review and disinterested enquiry continue to be aspired to. New complex phenomena such as climate change, and the role ascribed to scientific knowledge in public debates about climate change policy, demand adjustments to the way in which science is governed and how its knowledge is policed. With respect to climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the creation of this new operating environment for science or, one might say, is an attempt to create a new interface between science and policy suited to a ‘post-normal’ operation of science. Yet exactly what the IPCC is, how it is governed, what sort of knowledge it

For example, with respect to North Atlantic hurricanes, the fact that there has not been detection of a change in the statistics of storms since 1900 means that there is not a climate change signal to be attributed. This stands in contrast to the robust detection of an increase in global average surface temperatures since the 19th century, which the IPCC attributes with high levels of certainty to human causes.

More precisely, the IPCC’s climate model projections of changes in extreme events do not show identifiable increases in disaster losses for many decades, and often much longer.

According to the temperature records kept by the UK Met Office (and other series are much the same), over the past 150 years (that is, from the very beginnings of the Industrial Revolution), mean global temperature has increased by a little under a degree centigrade—according to the Met Office, 0.8°C. This has happened in fits and starts, which are not fully understood. To begin with, to the extent that anyone noticed it, it was seen as a welcome and natural recovery from the rigours of the Little Ice Age. But the great bulk of it—0.5°C out of the 0.8°C—occurred during the last quarter of the twentieth century. It was then that global warming alarmism was born. But since then, and wholly contrary to the expectations of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, who confidently predicted that global warming would not merely continue but would accelerate, given the unprecedented growth of global carbon dioxide emissions, as China’s coalbased economy has grown by leaps and bounds, there has been no further warming at all. To be precise, the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a deeply flawed body whose nonscientist chairman is a committed climate alarmist, reckons that global warming has latterly been occurring at the rate of—wait for it—0.05°Cs per decade, plus or minus 0.1°C. Their figures, not mine. In other words, the observed rate of warming is less than the margin of error. And that margin of error, it must be said, is implausibly small. After all, calculating mean global temperature from the records of weather stations and maritime observations around the world, of varying quality, is a pretty heroic task in the first place. Not to mention the fact that there is a considerable difference between daytime and night-time temperatures. In any event, to produce a figure accurate to hundredths of a degree is palpably absurd.

If the scientific community has been asked to judge a matter—(as the National Academy of Sciences routinely is)—or if they have self-organized to do so (as in the Ozone Trends Panel or the IPCC), then it makes sense to take the results of their investigations very seriously. These are the title searches of modern science and public policy. It does not make sense to dismiss them just because some person, somewhere, doesn’t agree. And it especially does not make sense to dismiss the consensus of experts if the dissenter is superannuated, disgruntled, a habitual contrarian, or in the pay of a group with an obvious ideological agenda or vested political or economic interest. Or in some cases, all of the above.

The primary claim made by the IPCC and other warmists was that there was a ‘consensus’ among the world’s scientists, but anyone familiar with science knows that it does not operate on consensus. --Shouting from the Rooftops, Warning Signs blog, December 20, 2012

1988 was a watershed year for interest in climate change. Scientists were speaking out, bills were introduced in Congress, the IPCC was formed, and the first steps were taken toward an international agreement. This threatened those who were making billions in profits from fossil fuel-related activities and so they began to strike back. In 1989 the leading oil and automotive companies, along with the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, formed the Global Climate Coalition (GCC).

Science works by creating theories based on assumptions, which other scientists, performing as skeptics, test. The structure and mandate of the IPCC was in direct contradiction to this scientific method.

The overwhelming majority of scientists in climate and related fields, therefore, remain commendably open to the possibility that some other influence—such as the sun—may be the true primum mobile of the Earth’s climate. In manipulating its selection and representation of the scientific literature on the solar influence on global mean surface temperature, the IPCC has attempted to bolster the stance of a tiny minority of scientists and then to pretend, with 95 per cent confidence, that this represents a ‘scientific consensus’. Such a consensus, even if it did exist, would be of no interest to science.

It wasn’t the Sierra Club that tried to pressure the National Academy of Sciences over the 1983 Carbon Dioxide Assessment; it was officials from the Department of Energy under Ronald Reagan. It wasn’t Environmental Defense that worked with Bill Nierenberg to alter the Executive Summary of the 1983 Acid Rain Peer Review Panel; it was the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. And it was the Wall Street Journal spreading the attack on Santer and the IPCC, not Mother Jones.

term decision-makers,” says Pokorný. “To the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], we have the atmosphere and in the atmosphere are greenhouse gases. If greenhouse gases go up, it’s a warmer climate. It’s different when you consider the biosphere and atmosphere and the energy balance between the universe and surface of the earth. There’s been a simplification of climate change, a train which goes along, driven by lawyers and business.” The CO2 mafia, as they’ve begun to regard it.

The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) synthesized the results from eighteen climate models used by groups around the world to estimate climate sensitivity and its uncertainty. They estimated that a doubling of CO2 would lead to an increase in global average temperature of about 5.4°F,

Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical and spiritual needs…We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us.” —Mike Hulme, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and IPCC Lead Author (2009)51

But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy…One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy any more.” —Ottmar Edenhofer, Co-chair of IPCC Working Group III, Lead Author (2010)105

But since the beginning of our new century, global temperatures have been flat to declining, despite the continuing rise in CO2. None of the 20 climate models that the IPCC relies on predicted the declining temperature trends of the last ten years. Is something else at work here?

we learn that the way to deal with our carbon dioxide problem is through technology (low-carbon energy sources; whiz-bang contraptions to capture carbon), political will, or both: strategies that aren’t getting us anywhere, create divisions among people and groups that should be working together, and, says the IPCC, won’t have much near-term leverage on atmospheric carbon dioxide.

the IPCC doesn’t actually do scientific research. It is primarily a political advocacy group that cloaks itself in the aura of scientific respectability while it cherry-picks the science that best supports its desired policy outcomes, and marginalizes or ignores science that might contradict the party line.

The primary goal of climate research is no longer the advancement of knowledge; it is instead the protection and dissemination of the IPCC party line.

Unfortunately, in global warming research only one hypothesis is now allowed by the adherents to the IPCC process and narrative.

Today, TV weather presenters have morphed into climate and weather presenters, blaming a “broken climate” for many of the severe weather events that they cover. Indeed, it has become de rigueur for the media, politicians, and even some scientists to implicate human influences as the cause of heat waves, droughts, floods, storms, and whatever else the public fears. It’s a pretty easy sell: the on-the-scene reporting is powerful—and often moving—and our poor memories of past events can make “unprecedented” quite convincing. But the science tells a different story. Observations extending back over a century indicate that most types of extreme weather events don’t show any significant change—and some such events have actually become less common or severe—even as human influences on the climate grow. In general, there are high levels of uncertainty involved in detecting trends in extreme weather. Here are some (perhaps surprising) summary statements from the IPCC’s AR5 WGI report, indicating what we know (or don’t know) about a few such trends: •​“. . . low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.”1 •​“. . . low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century . . .”2 •​“. . . low confidence in trends in small-scale severe weather phenomena such as hail and thunderstorms . . .”3 •​“. . . confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones [storms] since 1900 is low.”4

1. Data show the CO2 level rose to 410 ppm by 2020, an increase of 130 ppm. 2. The IPCC assumes its core theory is true, which forces the conclusion that human CO2 caused all the increase above 280 ppm. 3. IPCC agrees that human CO2 emissions are less than 5 percent of natural CO2 emissions. 4. How can less that 5 percent of all CO2 emissions cause 32 percent of the CO2 in the atmosphere? Answer: It can’t. 8.2 Multiple lines of evidence prove IPCC’s core theory is wrong. 1. Ice core data prove natural CO2 caused the CO2 increase. 2. Direct CO2 data prove CO2 was much higher than 280 ppm before 1750. 3. Leaf stomata data prove CO2 was much higher than 280 ppm before 1750. 4. Statistics prove human CO2 is not the primary cause of the increase in CO2. 5. IPCC’s human carbon cycle is not consistent with its own natural carbon cycle. This is a basic physics error. 6. Inspection shows IPCC’s human carbon cycle is based on IPCC’s invalid assumption that its core theory is true. 8.3 A simple physics carbon cycle model replicates IPCC’s data for its natural carbon cycle. 1. This model easily calculates the true human carbon cycle that is compatible with IPCC’s natural carbon cycle. 2. The true human carbon cycle shows human CO2 has

In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of United Nations scientists who summarized the worldwide findings on climate change, concluded that meeting the Paris target of 1.5°C/2.7° F would be possible, but it would require “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”10

In contradiction of the scientific method, IPCC assumes its implicit hypothesis is correct and that its only duty is to collect evidence and make plausible arguments in the hypothesis’s favor.

IPCC models do not incorporate important solar factors such as fluctuations in magnetic intensity and overestimate the role of human-related CO2 forcing.

IPCC ignores mounting evidence that climate sensitivity to CO2 is much lower than its models assume

IPCC’s third false postulate is that increases in atmospheric CO2 precede, and then force, parallel increases in temperature.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), created to find and disseminate research finding a human impact on global climate, is not a credible source. It is agenda-driven, a political rather than scientific body, and some allege it is corrupt.

Indeed, it’s much farther advanced than most people realize. In 2015, at the Paris climate talks, the world’s governments set a goal of holding temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius and, at the very least, below 2 degrees; by the fall of 2018 the IPCC reported that we might go past that 1.5 degree mark by 2030.

From Human Institutions, by Prade (Text-book, tenth and eleventh grades): Interchange is another of the strange accommodations necessary to the functioning of what we have termed ‘the total mechanism’. It is a fact that kidnapping for ransom is a common crime, owing to the ease by which escape via spaceship can be effected. In the past the system for paying ransom often broke down, owing to the hatreds and suspicions inevitably generated, and many boys and girls were never returned to their homes. Hence the necessity for Interchange, which is to be found on Sasani, a planet in the near Beyond, and functions as a broker between kidnapper and those paying ransom. Interchange guarantees good faith in the transaction. The kidnapper receives his money minus the Interchange fee; the victim is restored safely to his home … Interchange is officially denounced but practically tolerated; since it is believed that conditions would be far worse in its absence. Occasionally certain groups discuss the feasibility of commissioning the IPCC to stage a raid upon Interchange; somehow nothing ever comes of it.

Anyone who believes climate change could kill billions of people and cause civilizations to collapse might be surprised to discover that none of the IPCC reports contain a single apocalyptic scenario. Nowhere

In conclusion, the IPCC misled an entire generation of scientists and policy-makers, telling them the human impact on the Earth’s climate poses a genuine threat to human well-being and other life on the planet while deliberately and repeatedly hiding uncertainty, the absence of critical data, and evidence that questions or contradicts its apocalyptic prediction. Many thoughtful and well-intended people accept the IPCC’s claims unconditionally, taking at face value its claim to represent the “consensus of scientists.” They were betrayed. The result is a terrible crime against science, the adoption of unnecessary and very costly public policies, and grave damage to the reputation and credibility of science.

Evidence for climate change has been available for some time, so why has this 'urgent global response' (in Stern's words) not occurred? The IPCC (2015) have argued that we could limit the effects of climate change by changing our individual and collective behaviour. We could fly less, eat less meat, use public transport, cycle or walk, recycle, choose more low carbon products, have shorter showers, waste less food or reduce home energy use. There has been some significant change but nothing like the 'global response' required to ameliorate the further deleterious effects of climate change. We are reminded here of a somewhat depressing statistic reported by a leading multinational, Unilever, in their 'sustainable Living Plan.' In 2013, they outlined how they were going to halve the greenhouse gas impact of their products across the life cycle by 2020. To achieve this goal, they reduced greenhouse gas emissions from their manufacturing chain. They opted for more environmentally friendly sourcing of raw materials, doubled their use of renewable energy and produced concentrated liquids and powders. They reduced greenhouse gas emissions from transport and greenhouse gas emissions from refrigeration. They also restricted employee travel. The result of all these initiatives was that their 'greenhouse gas footprint impact per consumer... increased by around 5% since 2010.' They concluded, 'We have made good progress in those areas under our control but ... the big challenges are those areas not under direct control like... consumer behaviour ' (2013:16; emphasis added). It seems that consumers are not 'getting the message.' They are not opting for the low carbon alternatives in the way envisaged; they are not changing the length of their showers (to reduce energy and water consumption); they are not breaking their high-carbon habits. The question is why?

have no way of knowing how cold (or warm) the globe actually got”, how did the IPCC know it’s hotter than it’s been for a thousand years?

IPCC authors were exaggerating or misrepresenting the science for effect.

In response to the IPCC’s decision to let the exaggerators write the Summary for Policymakers, Tol resigned. “I simply thought it was incredible,” he said. “I told Chris Field, the chairman, about this, and I quietly withdrew.

150 million more people would die from air pollution alone in a 2-degree warmer world than in a 1.5-degree warmer one. Later that year, the IPCC raised the stakes further: in the gap between 1.5 degrees and 2, it said, hundreds of millions of lives were at stake.

Neither negative-emissions method—“natural” approaches involving revitalized forests and new agricultural practices, technological ones that would deploy machines to remove carbon from the atmosphere—requires wholesale transformation of the global economy as it is presently constituted. Which is perhaps why negative emissions, once a last-ditch, if-all-else-fails strategy, have recently been built into all conventional climate-action goals. Of 400 IPCC emissions models that land us below two degrees Celsius, 344 feature negative emissions, most of them significantly. Unfortunately, negative emissions are also, at this point, almost entirely theoretical.

Why did the IPCC so quickly and uncritically accept the Mann et al hockey stick analysis when it first appeared? I cannot help but conclude that it’s because they wanted to believe it.

At 2°C “the ice sheets begin their collapse”.[13] Wallace-Wells says that while “most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving … most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them [to rising sea levels] within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade”. More than 600 million people live within 30 feet of sea level. At just 3°C sea levels would rise by 50 metres.[14] London, Brussels, New York, Buenos Aires and Mumbai, to name a few, would be permanently under water. The climate change crisis is an extremely serious existential threat. Before the IPCC’s 2018 report, it could feel as if the topic barely seemed to register with politicians, the media or the general public, either in collective denial or complacent about its supposedly distant effects. But now a collective eco-consciousness is taking hold – the effects are already being felt and can no longer be ignored. Since 2005, the number of floods has increased by a factor of 15, extreme temperature events by a factor of 20, and wildfires sevenfold; the 20 warmest years since records began have been in the past 22 years.[15] Since 1980, the planet has seen a 50-fold increase in the number of places experiencing dangerous or extreme heat.[16] The number of heatwaves affecting the planet’s oceans tripled in the past couple of years, having already jumped by more than 50% in the three decades to 2016, killing swathes of sea-life “like wildfires that take out huge areas of forest”, according to the Marine Biological Association.[17] This is adding to ocean acidification, whereby the CO2 in the oceans rises at the expense of oxygen, suffocating the coral reefs that support as much as a quarter of all marine life. Meanwhile, 95% of the world’s population is breathing dangerously polluted air, killing at least nine million people a year, damaging our cognitive ability and respiratory systems and even our DNA. Pollution itself “endangers the stability of the Earth’s support systems and threatens the continuing survival of human societies”, according to the Commission on Pollution and Health.[18

The Paris Climate Accord in 2015 was nothing more than an international ruling class trade deal committing to crimes against humanity.[28] In principle, it agreed to aim to limit warming to 1.5ºC, but none of the commitments were legally binding and the IPCC said that the actual commitments made still amounted to 3.2ºC by 2100. Even if they were honoured, annual carbon emissions would rise from 50 billion tonnes to 55-60 billion tonnes by 2030 when they need to be cut by at least 36 billion tonnes just for a 50/50 chance of avoiding the 2ºC tipping point. Even the expense of these minimal commitments proved too much for the US, which pulled out of the Accord in 2017, having never ratified the Kyoto Protocol that it signed up to in 1998 either. In July 2019 it was revealed that only 20 of 160 of the biggest emitting companies had been meeting the targets agreed in Paris.[29

Like many readers, I had assumed the authority on climate was the IPCC – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – but it turns out they’ve been consistently underestimating the changes. In 2007 they said an ice-free Arctic was a possibility by 2100. That sounds far enough away to calm the nerves. But real-time measurements are documenting such rapid loss of ice that some of the world’s top climate scientists are saying it could be ice free in the next few years.

there is a conspiracy among some politicians and some of the IPCC leaders to get international agreements to regulate greenhouse gas emissions no matter what the science says.

almost all options for tackling global warming involve more governmental control over society, a political bias ends up coloring the IPCC leadership’s message in a way that minimizes scientific uncertainties and maximizes public alarm.

The IPCC claims that global warming or global cooling will occur only in response to an energy imbalance imposed on the system “externally.

The IPCC leadership has purposely avoided what is a fundamental tenet of scientific investigation: testing alternative hypotheses.

the IPCC was formed for largely political reasons, not scientific.

Sixty years ago, Einstein spoke with the voice of God. Thirty years ago, Walter Cronkite every day told us “the way it is,” and the New York Times delivered to our doorsteps “All the news that’s fit to print.” Twenty years ago, Alan Greenspan applied infallible formulas to ensure our prosperity. When I was a boy and factual disputes arose in my family, they were settled by consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica. Back then, the world of information was shaped like a pyramid. Those at the top decided signal from noise, knowledge from fraud, certainty from uncertainty. The public and mass media embraced this arrangement. All things being equal, authority was trusted and relied on. Today we drown in data, yet thirst for meaning. That world-transforming tidal wave of information has disproportionately worsened the noise-to-signal ratio. According to Taleb, “The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.”67 And the more you know, the less you trust, as the gap between reality and the authorities’ claims of competence becomes impossible to ignore. If the IPCC climatologists fear a dispute with skeptics, how can they be believed? If the Risk Commission seismologists can’t warn us about catastrophic risk, who will? As I tried to show in this chapter, the public has lost faith in the people on whom it relied to make sense of the world—journalists, scientists, experts of every stripe. By the same process, the elites have lost faith in themselves.

No, no. I just can’t accustom myself to that kind of talk, here on the esplanade, in peaceful Avente. But I suppose I’m actually enjoying it. If you’re not a criminal, who or what are you?” “Kirth Gersen.” “You must work for the IPCC.” “No.” “Then you must be on the Institute’s Special Committee.” “I’m just Kirth Gersen.” He rose to his feet. “Let’s walk for a bit.

Intuitively, I am hard-pressed to believe that most people would endorse the notion that the future of humankind is worth no more than a single apartment. Chichilnisky, a major figure in the IPCC, has argued that this kind of thinking about discount rates is not only ridiculous but immoral; it exalts a “dictatorship of the present” over the future. Economists could retort that people say they value the future, but don’t act like it, even when the future is their own. And it is demonstrably true that many—perhaps most—men and women don’t set aside for retirement, buy enough insurance, prepare their wills, or a hundred other precautions, even if they have sufficient resources. If people won’t make long-term provisions for their own lives, why should we expect people to bother about climate change for strangers many decades from now?

Teehalt looked at him sidewise. “You are very interested in Malagate.” Gersen shrugged. “One hears many strange tales.” “True. But I do not care to document them. And do you know why?” “No.” “I have changed my thoughts about you. Now I suspect you of weaselry.” “If I were a weasel,” said Gersen smiling, “I’d hardly admit it. The IPCC has few friends Beyond.

No IPCC model has been validated—they cannot recreate past climate conditions, therefore, they cannot make valid predictions or even reasonable scenarios.

the IPCC, among others, views nuclear power as one of the cleanest energy generation options available.

2009/2010, the ‘consensus’ suffered its three most damaging blows yet: the release of the Climategate emails between the little group of scientists at the heart of the IPCC establishment; the collapse in Copenhagen of the long-planned bid to agree a new global climate treaty, again essentially because of a division between developing nations and the West; a series of scandals that revealed that the most widely-quoted and alarming claims in the 2007 IPCC report had not been based on science at all, but on claims made in press releases and false reports put out by climate activists.

scientists contribute to writing and reviewing the IPCC’s reports, which are then reviewed by governments. I myself know well the climate scientists at my own university, University of Massachusetts Amherst, who are involved in various IPCC projects. These are very committed, capable, and credible people. So it is fair to say that the IPCC does bring together current, high-quality assessments of mainstream climate science on any given set of questions. There remains a small band of climate deniers, whose positions are given credence and then amplified in the mainstream media far beyond what is warranted given the scientific findings they have produced.24 Nevertheless, while it is implausible, we cannot totally rule out the possibility that some of their positions may have merit. But, exactly to this point, it is also the case that the IPCC is scrupulous in recognizing a high degree of uncertainty in all of its estimates. For example, its targets for the needed level of emissions reductions are never presented as a single figure, as in, say, “we must reduce emissions by 80 percent within twenty years or face these certain terrible consequences.” Rather, the IPCC always presents its conclusions in terms of ranges and probabilities. It is also true that the IPCC has regularly changed its assessments to a significant degree, as illustrated in recent years by some of its most important publications. Thus, in its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, the IPCC concluded that in order to stabilize the global average (mean) temperature

instead of making precise predictions of future concentrations, the IPCC created a set of scenarios. They have the rather complicated name of “Representative Concentration Pathways,” or RCPs. These are meant to span a plausible range of possibilities for population, economy, technology, and so on.

In addition to starting the ball rolling on an international convention, the Villach and Toronto conferences had another major upshot, this one quite unintended. Many governments, including that of the United States, did not like the scientific community taking the reins on policy entrepreneurship. Thus, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international body established in 1988 under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization, was created (with US backing) for governments to assess anthropogenic climate change based on the latest science. Note the word Intergovernmental.

According to the IPCC, just stabilizing human influences on the climate would require global annual per capita emissions of CO2 to fall to less than one ton by 2075, a level comparable to today’s emissions from such countries as Haiti, Yemen, and Malawi. For comparison, 2015 annual per capita emissions from the United States, Europe, and China were, respectively, about 17, 7, and 6 tons. •​Energy demand increases strongly and universally with rising economic activity and quality of life; global demand is expected to grow by about 50 percent through midcentury as most of the world’s people improve their lot. •​Fossil fuels supply 80 percent of the world’s energy today and remain the most reliable and convenient means of meeting growing energy demand. •​The energy-supply infrastructure of electric generating plants, transmission lines, refineries, and pipelines changes slowly for unavoidable structural reasons. •​Developed countries would certainly have to reduce their emissions, but even if those were to halve, and per capita emissions of the developing world grew only to those of today’s lower-emitting developed countries, annual global emissions would still increase by midcentury. •​The tension between emissions reductions and economic development is complicated by uncertainties in how the climate will change under human and natural influences and how those changes will affect natural and human systems.

the IPCC now spoke comfortably of consensus and endorsed those mysterious concepts of sustainability and energy that renewed itself. We even thought that this way somehow we could save the planet and grow richer as well, a more pleasing outcome than the uncomfortable truth.

We wrote, “The constancy of these somewhat independent results encourages us to conclude that 21st century warming will be modest and near the low end of the IPCC TAR [Third Assessment Report] projections.

the UN IPCC desperately needs this graph.

In the 2013 report, the IPCC concluded, 'Warming of the climate system is unequivocal (italics added) and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia ... It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause.' In 2015, the IPCC concluded that they are 'now 95 percent certain that humans are the main cause of current global warming' (IPCC 2015: v; italics added). The IPCC also suggested, on the basis of the existing evidence, a rise in global temperature will have 'severe and widespread impacts on ... substantial species extinctions, large risks to global and regional food security ... growing food or working outdoors,' as well as producing more extreme fluctuations in weather, including droughts, flooding, and storms. The conclusions of the IPCC have been endorsed and supported by over 200 scientific agencies around the globe, including the principle scientific organisations in each of the G8 countries such as the National Academy of Science in the United States and the Royal Society in the United Kingdom.

The report also found, intriguingly, that climate change policies were more likely to hurt food production and worsen rural poverty than climate change itself. The “climate policies” the authors refer to are ones that would make energy more expensive and result in more bioenergy use (the burning of biofuels and biomass), which in turn would increase land scarcity and drive up food costs. The IPCC comes to the same conclusion.65