These items caught my eye – 15 October 2013

With the passing away of the IPCC’s AR5, I decided to chuck the last (for the moment) shovelful onto the casket by way of a round-up of blog entries from around the Web. Some of these you may have seen already but I hope there is the odd snippet to spark your interest.

How anyone can possibly class this as a serious piece of scientific justification for the $billions being spent on mitigation is beyond me. But then we knew it was never about science, didn’t we? Please remember to read the comments, as the information (and the links) contained in them often put the main article into context..
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IPCC: Fixing the Facts

Posted on Sep 30, 2013 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 say, this diagram did not survive. Instead, IPCC replaced the damning (but accurate) diagram with a new diagram in which the inconsistency has been disappeared.

Here is Figure 1.4 of the Second Order Draft, showing post-AR4 observations outside the envelope of projections from the earlier IPCC assessment reports (see previous discussion here). – Click here to read the full article
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Negotiating the IPCC SPM

Posted on October 1, 2013 by Judith Curry

JC comment: not sure what to say here, other than that this is very high-level motivated sausage making indeed. But how do they claim they are policy neutral?

A fascinating look at the how the deliberations in Stockholm influenced the final IPCC AR5 WG1 Summary for Policy Makers

The iisd is a reporting service for environment and development negotiations. They provide fascinating context and details regarding the negotiations last week in Sweden: Summary of the 12th session of Working Group I (WGI) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the 36th session of the IPCC.

Below are excerpts related to topics under recent discussion: – Click here to read the full article
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A question of attribution

Posted on October 14, 2013 by Paul Matthews

On the day the SPM was published, I wrote about the key IPCC claim that it was “extremely likely” (i.e. at least 95% certain) that human influence had caused most of the warming since 1950. This was an increase on the AR4 attribution statement of 90%, which seemed odd in the light of another six years with no warming, contrary to climate science predictions, and increasing number of papers from mainstream climate scientists acknowledging a discrepancy between models and observations. However, a direct comparison is not appropriate since the IPCC moved the goalposts from greenhouse gases to all human influences. At the time of that post the justification for the 95% claim was not available, but the SPM referred to Chapter 10 of the main report, “Detection and Attribution of Climate Change” in particular section 10.3. – Click here to read the full article
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Why the IPCC Meeting Isn’t Being Televised

Posted on September 26, 2013 by Donna Laframboise

Scientific truth isn’t negotiated in the dead of night behind closed doors.

Since Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been in a meeting. The purpose of that meeting is to take a document authored by scientists and ensure that its wording is palatable to the powers that be.

Called the Summary for Policymakers, this is a 30-page précis of the IPCC’s as-yet-unreleased Working Group 1 report (which is expected to total 1,000 or so pages).

At the meeting, one sentence after another has been projected onto large screens. Diplomats, bureaucrats, and politicians from dozens of UN nations have haggled, horse traded, and negotiated. Eventually, phrasing that everyone can live with has been agreed upon. Then they’ve moved on to the next sentence.

The meeting is closed to the public. It is closed to the media. No minutes are kept. But let us imagine that a television camera had been smuggled inside. What would we see? – Click here to read the full article
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A report from the Royal

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Bishop Hill

The Royal Society is holding a two-day meeting to discuss the Working Group I report of the IPCC. Reader Katabasis was there and send this report.

So the first day of the meeting at the Royal Society to discuss the IPCC AR5 report was quite an eye-opener.

The tone was set from the start with the first two speakers wringing their hands over the issue of “communicating the message”, pointing out that sceptics were apparently “very good” at it. According to Mark Walport, chief scientific adviser to the Government, we sceptics (sorry, those who “deny the science”) are “single issue, great communicators.” Thomas Stocker followed in the second talk emphasising the “Key 19 messages” in the SPM report.

Bob Ward of the Grantham Institute, in the audience, stood and made some handwaving point that included “knowing that there were sceptics here who managed to get a ticket”. He cast his arm around to take in the whole audience as he said this and I wondered if he thought we were like hidden bodysnatchers amongst the innocent attendees that everyone needed to be wary of. – Click here to read the full article
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From ‘Hiding the Decline’ to ‘Burying the Pause’: Man-made Global Warming is still a lie

Posted on September 28, 2013 by Joe Quinn

Humor me for a moment and pretend that the biblical hell exists. The Global Warming proponents among the world’s climate scientists are going there. It’s a fitting place for people who prostitute their skills and energy to serve the despicable agenda of the global elite; people who use their positions of influence and authority to bamboozle the world and try to convince us that black is white, up is down and that humans are causing global warming on the planet when the Northern Hemisphere has experienced an unprecedented five successive bitterly cold winters.

Perhaps if their transition to hell is sufficiently seamless, and, unaware that anything has changed, they’ll be able to convince themselves that they were right all along.

Gifted with minds pre-disposed to scientific investigation and given access to data and instrumentation with which they are supposed to objectively explore our reality, these men and women are, more than anyone else, in a position to influence the course of human destiny towards positive or negative ends.

Sadly, many of them have chosen the road to hell. Click here to read the full article
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What is the IPCC?

Posted on October 13, 2013 by Ben Pile

Apparently some scientists have written some kind of ‘Assessment Report’. There’s lots of comment about it all over the web, media, and politics, and this probably the last climate blog to comment on the story. But perhaps there has not been as much comment as there was six or so years ago. The content of WGI’s SPM is mostly ‘scientific’ insofar as it purports to examine the ‘physical science basis’, and this blog isn’t about climate science as such. However, many things seem to be being said about the science presented in the AR5 WGI SPM which I think demonstrate that science and politics are harder to separate than anyone admits. After all, its authors are drawn from the sciences, but it is the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change. A relationship between science and politics exists before the panel has been assembled, much less cast its collective eye over the scientific literature. Moreover, the IPCC was initiated by a political process. There was a need for a consensus.

It was the previous IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers which prompted this blog, the first post of which began: – Click here to read the full article
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The science fiction of IPCC climate models

Posted on October 14, 2013 by Kesten C. Green, J. Scott Armstrong and Willie Soon

The human race has prospered by relying on forecasts that the seasons will follow their usual course, while knowing they will sometimes be better or worse. Are things different now?

For the fifth time now, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims they are. The difference, the IPCC asserts, is increased human emissions of carbon dioxide: a colorless, odorless, non-toxic gas that is a byproduct of growing prosperity. It is also a product of all animal respiration and is also essential for most life on Earth, yet in total it makes up only 0.0004 of the atmosphere.

The IPCC assumes that the relatively small human contribution of this gas to the atmosphere will cause global warming, and insists that the warming will be dangerous.

Other scientists contest the IPCC assumptions, on the grounds that the climatological effect of increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide is trivial – and that the climate is so complex and insufficiently understood that the net effect of human emissions on global temperatures cannot be forecasted. – Click here to read the full article
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IPCC AR5 climate report may be dead on arrival

Posted on October 1, 2013 by Jonathan DuHamel

The hallowed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a political organization pretending to do science, has issued its latest science fiction novel, the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and the gullible press is agog.

The main problem is that the climate model speculations have diverged from reality (see: “More evidence that climate models are wrong“). There has not been any statistically significant warming since 1998 even though carbon dioxide emissions keep rising at a greater rate. The models cannot explain this, nor can the IPCC. In spite of model failures, the IPCC is now 95% confident that human carbon dioxide emissions are responsible for the majority of global warming since 1950. The lack of any physical evidence to support that contention does not deter them.

The problem is shown in the graph below. – Click here to read the full article
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IPCC’s extreme sausage: unkosher and unsustainable treife

Posted on October 4, 2013 by Hilary Ostrov

On the heels of the release of a draft of Working Group I (WGI)’s contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), the U.K. Royal Society, one of the IPCC’s illustrious cheerleaders, has been holding a two-day meeting to discuss this report and the “next steps in climate science”.

The incomparable Josh, of CartoonsByJosh, was there to provide more of his brilliant sketches of a little meeting. Here’s one that I’ve lifted: – Click here to read the full article
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