IPCC Summary Report – Higher Certainty Suggests Cover Up

Posted: October 1, 2013 | Author: Jamie Spry | Filed under: AR5, Climate, IPCC | Leave a comment

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of
economic and environmental policy.”
– Timothy Wirth,
President of the UN Foundation

“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…
climate change provides the greatest opportunity to
bring about justice and equality in the world.”
– Christine Stewart,
former Canadian Minister of the Environment

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Following Fridays release of the IPCC‘s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), some interesting commentary from Des Moore, principle of the Institute for Private Enterprise and contributing writer to Quadrant Online  :

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Why has IPCC V claimed greater certainty than in IPCC IV about the human contribution to global warming when the uncertainty has clearly  increased? One answer may be  that it is necessary for the credibility of  IPCCs and associated scientists that greater certainty be claimed in order  to provide a cover for the increased doubts about numerous aspects of the dangerous warming thesis since IPCC IV in 2007. These doubts will be increased by the attempt in IPCC V to explain the pause as being due to more than 90 per cent of the extra heat generated between 1971 and 2010 from the increase in CO2 being absorbed in the ocean instead of causing temperatures to increase. But the sea surface temperature is in equilibrium with the air surface temperature so where or how is the heat hiding? And when will the absorption (and pause) stop?

I have not yet read the report but below is a selection of articles on it from today’s press. I have not copied in any of the programs shown on ABC or SBS TV as they appear to have been a repeat of advice supplied to them by warmist scientists or extracted from IPCC handouts. In short these taxpayer funded organisations continue to be a disgrace and, if they had had shareholders, would have long since been wound up or sold.

By comparison one of the articles below published in the AFR actually included an extract from an interview I had with Gemma Daley. Incidentally, I am told that a lead author at the AFR on climate change (and an aggressive warmist) is no longer working at that organisation. Some other articles include the occasional query or reflect a modicum of scepticism. I have highlighted in red some of these.

Regrettably, the new Minister for the Environment* has stated that the government accepts “the science and the targets set for emissions reductions”. Perhaps he will be able to say which of the IPCC’s four alternative warming scenarios from 2000 to 2100 the government accepts. The fact that such alternatives are offered by the IPCC suggests uncertainty there about the extent of the alleged threat.

Note that only 110 of the 195 “eligible” (whoever they are) countries attended the Stockholm meeting which drafted the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers. One could argue that a large proportion of countries have not approved the Summary. Note also that there are more reports to be published.

Des Moore

*Climatism Link

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Related press :

Hunt claims vindication on carbon tax

AFR 28 Sep 2013

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Friday night said there was a 95 per cent probability humans are contributing climate change. Photo: Rob Homer

Gemma Daley and James Massola

Australia is on track for its hottest year on record in 2013 and the past decade was the globe’s warmest, according to an international report based on the best scientific understanding of climate change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Friday night said there was a 95 per cent probability humans are contributing climate change, confirming a report in Friday’s The Australian Financial Review, and that temperatures could rise by from 0.9 degrees Celsius at the bottom of a low-emissions scenario to 5.4 degrees Celsius at the top of a high-emissions scenario by the end of the century.

Keep Reading (paywalled) »

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Why the pause? IPCC report is unconvincing

AFR 28 Sep 2013, Comment, Mark Lawson

The oceans are absorbing increases in global warming, the report claims. Photo: Glenn Campbell

Well before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the summary of its latest assessment of the physical science of global warming on Friday, experts worldwide were dealing with the fallout of the report.

That included explaining just why average global temperatures have done little in the past 15 years or so when they should have been increasing.

The IPCC, the peak body for the global warming industry, sets out what amounts to the agreed case for global warming in major reports issued every seven years.

These reports underpin a now vast industry in research grants, environment lobby firms and advisory businesses of all types.

The reports also provide the basis for billions of dollars in trading climate credits, many thousands of well-paid government jobs in climate bureaucracies, and an enormous green energy industry.

Keep Reading (paywalled) »

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Science solid on global warming, IPCC declares

Graham Lloyd, Environment Editor |

The Australian,  September 28, 2013

THE case for a global agreement to limit carbon-dioxide emissions has been bolstered after the world’s top climate scientists increased their level of confidence that humans are changing the climate.

Despite predicting a range of possible temperatures over the century – an increase of 0.3C to 4.8C by 2100 – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth report for policy-makers warns of serious consequences if no action is taken.

“We need to seize the opportunities of a low-carbon future,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said last night. “The heat is on, now we must act.”

As expected, the fifth assessment report by the UN body said warming of the climate system was “unequivocal” and there was now a 95 per cent probability that humans were contributing to climate change, up from 90 per cent in the 2007 report.

The IPCC said that since the 1950s many of the observed changes were “unprecedented over decades to millennia”.

“The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases has increased,” said the report, released last night. The report said each of the past three decades had been warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850. The IPCC report conceded the so-called “pause” in average surface temperatures over the past 15 years, but said it was not significant.

“Due to natural variability, trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends,” the report said.

It said “internal variability” – including volcanic eruptions, reduced solar activity and a possible redistribution of heat within the ocean – could explain the observed reduction in surface warming from 1998 to 2012 as compared with 1951-2012.

It conceded there may also be “an overestimate of the response to increasing greenhouse gas and other anthropogenic forcing”.

The report said there were more hot days and fewer cold ones; heat waves had increased in large parts of Europe, Asia and Australia and rainfall had increased in some areas.

As atmospheric carbon dioxide continued to increase, there was rising concern about increasing acidification of the ocean.

The report said continued emissions of greenhouse gases would cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate system. “Limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions,” it said.

Environment Minister Greg Hunt said the report’s findings reinforced the government’s “bipartisan support for the science and the targets set for emissions reductions”.

Greens leader Christine Milne said the report confirmed urgent and deep emission cuts globally were needed. She said the government had “no option but to abandon” its direct-action approach and take “urgent and serious measures immediately”.

The director of the Britain-based Global Warming Policy Foundation, Benny Peiser, was critical of the report’s handling of the pause.

“It has not only decided to discount the global warming standstill since 1997 as irrelevant, but has also deleted from its draft document its original acknowledgement that climate models failed to ‘reproduce the observed reduction in surface warming trend over the last 10-15 years’,” Dr Peiser said.

IPCC working groups co-chairman Thomas Stocker said last night the rise in global surface temperatures by the end of the 21st century was likely to exceed 1.5C relative to 1850 to 1900 under all future carbon emissions scenarios.

The most optimistic of four scenarios for warming forecasts an average temperature rise of 1C by 2100 over 2000 levels, ranging from 0.3C to 1.7C.

The highest IPCC scenario has an average additional warming this century of 3.7C, ranging from 2.6C to 4.8C.

Unlike the previous report in 2007, which forecast a range of temperature increases from 0.3C to 6.4C by 2100, the fifth update did not nominate a most likely temperature rise figure.

The likely range for Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (how much average global temperature is expected to rise after a doubling of atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations) was now deemed to be 1.5C to 4.5C, a revision from the Fourth Assessment Report, which provided a range of 2C to 4.5C.

By the end of the century, sea levels were projected to rise between 26cm and 55cm under the best-case scenario to 45cm to 82cm under the worst case. In 2007, the rise was projected in a range from 18cm to 59cm.

Andy Pitman, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of NSW, said the report “finally puts to rest the role humans play in causing global warming”.

“The good news is it highlights we can still avoid two degrees of warming if we deeply and rapidly cut emissions of greenhouse gases,” Professor Pitman said.

CSIRO fellow and IPCC lead author Steve Rintoul said there was “even greater confidence that climate is changing, (that) humans are largely responsible for the warming observed over the last 50 years, and that substantial and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will be needed to avoid the worst consequences of climate change”.

The IPCC report was approved at 5.30am after a marathon session at the Stockholm gathering of scientists and officials from more than 110 of the 195 eligible countries.

The IPCC document will play a key role in negotiations for a global agreement to cut global carbon-dioxide emissions which includes China, the US and India.

The UN has set a target to reach agreement in 2015 for a plan to take effect from 2020.

IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said he believed a market mechanism was the key to reducing carbon-dioxide emissions. “We have to put a price on carbon,” Dr Pachauri said. “In the ultimate analysis it is only through the market we might be able to get a large enough and rapid enough response,” he said.

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Alarm on global warming

The Age, September 28 2013,
Nick Miller Stockholm and Tom Arup

It is more certain than ever that human civilisation is the main cause of global warming, putting the world on track for dangerous temperature rises, a United Nations panel says.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it is “extremely likely” that humans are the dominant cause of warming since the mid-20th century, with carbon dioxide emissions the main factor.

If emissions remain high, by 2100 temperatures are likely to rise by more than 2 degrees – and up to 4.8 degrees – breaching a threshold agreed by governments as limiting the worst impacts of climate change.

Heatwaves will be more frequent and last longer, the report says. Most wet regions will get more rainfall, and most dry regions less.

Glaciers and ice sheets will continue to shrink, and sea levels will rise more quickly.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said political commitment was needed to keep global temperature rise below the 2 degrees threshold.

”The heat is on, now we must act,” he said.

On Friday in Stockholm, the IPCC released a summary of its fifth major assessment of climate science after a week of debate, and years of work.

“The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amount of snow and ice has diminished, the global mean sea level has risen and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased,” said Qin Dahe, co-chair of the IPCC working group that compiled the report.

The findings were based on multiple lines of independent evidence, he said, much of it new since the IPCC’s previous report in 2007.

His co-chair, Thomas Stocker, said “substantial and sustained” reductions of greenhouse gas emissions would be necessary to prevent further warming and climate change.

The report found that:

■Each of the past three decades has been warmer than any preceding decade since 1850, and the past 30 years have been the warmest since AD600. Combined land and ocean temperatures rose 0.85 degrees on average since 1880.

■From 1901 to 2010, the sea level rose 19 centimetres, more quickly than the average for the last 2000 years. It is very likely to rise even more quickly during the 21st century.

■Greenhouse gases have reached levels unseen in at least 800,000 years, from fossil fuel emissions and land use. Oceans have absorbed a third of the extra carbon dioxide, making them more acidic.

■It is very likely that Arctic sea cover will continue to shrink and thin, and spring snow cover will continue to decrease through the 21st century.

■It is more likely than not that there will be more intense tropical cyclones.

Evidence for human influence in climate change has grown in the past five years, the report says.

Last night the federal government said it would push ahead with plans to dismantle Australia’s carbon tax. Environment Minister Greg Hunt said the government would repeal the market-based carbon-pricing mechanism set up by the former Labor government and that electricity prices and emissions have risen under the carbon tax.

The coalition would endeavour to reduce carbon emissions by 5 per cent by 2020 with a capped $3.2 billion fund on activities that cut greenhouse gas emissions like revegetation and improving soil carbon, he said.

The report has been six years in the making and has involved over 800 scientists from around the world.

The panel was established by the UN to provide scientific assessments of climate change to governments, who get the final sign off on its reports.

The working group went right down to the wire, finishing the substantive parts of the report only hours ahead of its planned release after an all-night debate.

The group has been wrestling with figures that showed a slower rise in global temperatures than expected in the past decade.

The report concludes “with high confidence” that more than 90 per cent of the extra heat generated in between 1971 and 2010 has been stored in the world’s oceans.

Commenting on the report, United States Secretary of State John Kerry said: ”This is yet another wake-up call. Those who deny the science or choose excuses over action are playing with fire.

”This is science, these are facts, and action is our only option,” Senator Kerry said.

”If this isn’t an alarm bell, then I don’t know what one is. If ever there were an issue that demanded greater cooperation, partnership, and committed diplomacy, this is it.”

Asked if the report meant the world could not burn its fossil fuel reserves, IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said pricing carbon would an effective way to tackle emissions.

”It’s only through the market that we could get a large enough and rapid enough response,” he said.

Australian Academy of Science president Suzanne Cory said the world could be more certain than ever that human-induced climate change was real and a serious threat to the planet.

The 36-page ”summary for policymakers” released on Friday covers the first part of its assessment looking at the physical science, with the full version to be released on Monday.

It is based on 9200 scientific studies, more than three quarters of which were published since 2007.

Two more reports – looking at impacts and mitigation of climate change- will be released next year.

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Like the atmosphere the plot thickens yet again

The Age, Tom Arup, Environment Editor

So what now? Like its previous assessment six years ago, and those before it, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that the planet is warming dangerously and humans are the dominant cause.

In their more reflective moments, the scientists will tell you they wish they were wrong and that the Andrew Bolts of the world were right.

That global warming was not occurring. That warming had stopped. That it was not really that dangerous. That it was all due to natural variation. That it was one big conspiracy.

After all, who would really want to be right about such an enormous, transformative threat? Those working on climate science, of course, do not believe they have erred. The latest IPCC report has lifted the confidence of scientists and governments that humans have caused warming to an almost complete certainty.

Yes, warming has slowed in the past 15 years to below the long-term average. And no, scientists do not have a lot of confidence in explaining exactly why (it is probably a mix of ocean heat shifts, volcanos, aerosols and solar variations).

But nor has it got any cooler. Each of the past three decades was warmer than any preceding decade since records began.

This is a cautious, and largely technical report. Yet the IPCC still sets out strengthened evidence across all elements of the climate system.

The oceans, the ice sheets, extreme events of weather are all changing at an accelerated rate. These are significant warning signs of what is to come.

There are only so many times this message can be delivered to world governments before the reluctance to act conjures the words ”willful ignorance”. The last legally binding treaty on climate change to be drawn up was the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, covering developed countries.

Since then the world has tried and failed to hammer out a stronger, more encompassing treaty. Famously, the 2009 Copenhagen talks ended in disaster, stuck in self-interest and mistrust.

But self-interest will only go so far. That nagging science does not seem to be going away. And in the end, the atmosphere will not discriminate.

There have been some encouraging signs in recent years, particularly out of the US and China, which are making tentative steps to get their mammoth emissions under control. And the world will have another go at signing a full climate treaty at negotiations in Paris in 2015.

But we are cutting it fine to get our act together and begin making the changes needed: the reduction and end to conventional fossil fuel use and a halt to widespread clearing of forests.

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Good policy cuts out the climate extremists

AFR, 28 Sep 2013, Warwick McKibbin

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report by Working Group 1 which forms part of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) will be much discussed in coming days.

The final AR5 Report is not expected to be finalised until October 2014 but the ideological and political noise from all sides surrounding the release of the latest report has been and will be deafening.

Some people will argue it supports the view that a climate crisis is approaching and a major restructuring of the global economy at whatever cost should be undertaken. Other equally intelligent and passionate people will argue the report is finally a recognition of the failure of climate models to predict a levelling of temperature changes that is currently being observed, and thus proving the entire body of climate science wrong.

Keep Reading (paywalled) »

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Climate Depot Round Up: UN IPCC Exhumes, Brings Climate Catastrophe Back From The Grave…Politicians, Activists Dancing Like It’s 2007!

Climate Depot Report on Reaction to New IPCC Report

Marc Morano Statement: “It appears the UN IPCC rejected advice from many to deal with discrepancies between man-made global warming claims and climate reality. The UN chose to double down and act as though Climategate never happened or the global temperature standstill for 15 or more years does not exist. The UN IPCC has stuck to the same old script. However, less and less people are now willing to buy what they are selling. Global warming skeptics have thus far prevailed in this debate by relying on science, data, and healthy doses of skepticism. The UN IPCC — steeped in politics — appears incapable of producing a report that would challenge its government mandated narrative claiming man-made global warming is a  threat.” For an alternative to UN claims, see: CLIMATE STUDY COUNTERS UN IPCC: EVIDENCE LEANS AGAINST HUMAN-CAUSED GLOBAL WARMING — Group of 50 international scientists releases comprehensive new 1200-page report #

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Climatism Links :

• NATURE STUDY Confirms Global Warming Stopped 15 Years Ago | CACA
• Peer into the Heart of the IPCC, Find Greenpeace | CACA
• Déjà Vu : Himalayan glaciers to melt (again) by 2035! | CACA
• UN-Settled Science

• 44th Pacific “Sinking Islands” Extortion Forum | CACA
• 97% of climate models say that 97% of climate scientists are wrong | CACA
• Bureaucratic Dioxide
• Modelling Climate Alarmism
• GLOBAL WARMING THEORY – Circular reasoning at its best
• Europe’s Green Energy Basket Case Is Barack Obama’s Dream | CACA
• One Of The More Illuminating Articles You May Ever Read On Global Warming | CACA
• SHOCKING NEWS! Arctic Summers Ice-Free in a Few Days! | CACA
• Climate money: Monopoly science « JoNova | CACA

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