Lies, damned lies, and the IPCC

This release was first published as an article by Jeremy Beck in the 11 August 2021 Australian Alert Service.

Continuing an onslaught of alarmist pseudoscience, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on 9 August released its latest report, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Honest and competent scientists know this IPCC report is entirely political and the “science” is worse than junk. The report’s endorsement of “net zero” emissions is a prescription for economic destruction, poverty and resulting mass death. And the IPCC’s alarmist forecasts are so ridiculous that even establishment-backed scientists won’t drink the Kool-Aid. “You end up with numbers for even the near-term that are insanely scary—and wrong”, says Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Science, the peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, ran a 27 July 2021 article titled “UN climate panel confronts implausibly hot forecasts of future warming”. In this article, Schmidt, one of the world’s most prominent climatologists, was quoted as above. While Science still pushes the political position that human-caused global warming is an “alarming reality”, this bombshell article is an admission that the IPCC’s most extreme forecasts of climate catastrophe are simply false. The article states, “Many of the world’s leading models are now projecting warming rates that most scientists, including the modelmakers themselves, believe are implausibly fast. In advance of the UN report, scientists have scrambled to understand what went wrong….”

The alarmist climate models used by the IPCC assume that carbon dioxide is a far more significant driver of climate change than other natural factors such as cosmic activity. The Science article concedes this point as follows: “The models were also out of step with records of past climate. For example, scientists used the new model from NCAR [National Centre for Atmospheric Research] to simulate the coldest point of the most recent ice age, 20,000 years ago. Extensive paleoclimate records suggest Earth cooled nearly 6 °C compared with preindustrial times, but the model, fed with low ice age CO₂ levels, had temperatures plummeting by nearly twice that much, suggesting it was far too sensitive to the ups and downs of CO₂. ‘That is clearly outside the range of what the geological data indicate’, says Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona and a co-author of the work, which appeared in Geophysical Research Letters. ‘It’s totally out there.’”

Indeed, it is totally out there! In fact, CO₂ levels are so insignificant in driving climate that even a doubling or tripling of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would be insignificant with respect to global warming. Geologists know this from the Andean-Saharan glaciation, which occurred during the Paleozoic Era from 450 to 420 million years ago. During this Ice Age, atmospheric CO₂ concentration was around 4,000 parts per million (ppm), about ten times today’s concentration! For most of the last 600 million years of life on Earth, atmospheric CO₂ concentration exceeded 1,000 ppm and much of the time, including when the dinosaurs roamed, concentration exceeded 2,000 ppm. There was never a “tipping point” into runaway global warming from increased CO₂. But the IPCC’s latest report still entertains the theory as follows: “Abrupt responses and tipping points of the climate system, such as strongly increased Antarctic ice sheet melt and forest dieback, cannot be ruled out (high confidence).”

This latest IPCC report states the “likely range of total human-caused global surface temperature increase from 1850–1900 to 2010–2019 is 0.8 °C to 1.3 °C, with a best estimate of 1.07 °C”. Such a large range should be evidence enough that the “science” is not as settled as some would have us believe. The report states it is “very likely” that well-mixed greenhouse gases were the main driver of tropospheric warming since 1979 and it is “unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”. But “there is only limited evidence, with medium agreement, of human influence on the Antarctic Ice Sheet mass loss”. (Emphasis in original.)

The report refers to compound extreme events as the combination of multiple drivers and/or hazards that contribute to societal or environmental risk. “Examples are concurrent heatwaves and droughts, compound flooding (e.g., a storm surge in combination with extreme rainfall and/or river flow), compound fire weather conditions (i.e., a combination of hot, dry, and windy conditions), or concurrent extremes at different locations.” Perhaps this is supposed to sound frightening, but the report only states “medium confidence” that human influence has increased the chance of compound flooding or fire weather.

While the IPCC’s summary for policymakers sounds alarming, the uncertainties in the full report expose the alarmism as fraudulent “science”. Thousands of prominent scientists are speaking out despite a near-blackout in the mainstream media. For example, CLINTEL was founded in 2019 by emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and science journalist Marcel Crok. This global network of 900 scientists and professionals makes the point that “CO₂ is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO₂ is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth: additional CO₂ in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.”

It’s past time people understand this message. Net-zero emissions policy will further destroy our economy and is based on a big lie.