This post will remain at the top for a few days, new stories will appear below this one
UPDATE1: Andrew Revkin at the NYT weighs in, and semi endorses the leak, see update below – Anthony
UPDATE2: Alternate links have been sent to me, should go faster now. – Anthony
UPDATE3: The main site is down but a large “all in one” RAR file (and bittorrent) has been created by a readers, see below. – Anthony
UPDATE4: 7:30AM PST 12/14/12 reactions are now coming in worldwide, see here, and the IPCC is going to issue a statement today. – Anthony
UPDATE5: 8:30AM PST 12/14/12 The IPCC has issued a statement on the leak, see below. -Anthony
UPDATE6: 12PM PST 12/14/12 The real bombshell of the report is now evident, a lack of warming to match model projections, see it here
UPDATE7: 12:30PM PST 12/14/12 Prof. Roger Pielke Jr. Analysis of UN IPCC Draft report : IPCC ‘shows almost complete reversal from AR4 on trends in drought, hurricanes, floods’
UPDATE8: 5PM PST 12/14/12 Another IPCC reviewer speaks out, this time about water vapor trends – actual data and IPCC contradict each other.
UPDATE9: 2PM PST 12/16/12 A rebuttal to Steven Sherwood and the solar forcing pundits of the IPCC AR5 draft leak
Full AR5 draft leaked here, contains game-changing admission of enhanced solar forcing
(Alec Rawls) I participated in “expert review” of the Second Order Draft of AR5 (the next IPCC report), Working Group 1 (“The Scientific Basis”), and am now making the full draft available to the public. I believe that the leaking of this draft is entirely legal, that the taxpayer funded report report is properly in the public domain under the Freedom of Information Act, and that making it available to the public is in any case protected by established legal and ethical standards, but web hosting companies are not in the business of making such determinations so interested readers are encouraged to please download copies of the report for further dissemination in case this content is removed as a possible terms-of-service violation. My reasons for leaking the report are explained below. Here are the chapters:
From http://www.stopgreensuicide.com/
(which is down now, see updated links below in update #2)
Chapter 2: Observations: Atmosphere and Surface
Chapter 3: Observations: Ocean
Chapter 4: Observations: Cryosphere
Chapter 5: Information from Paleoclimate Archives
Chapter 6: Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles
Chapter 7: Clouds and Aerosols
Chapter 8: Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing
Chapter 9: Evaluation of Climate Models
Chapter 10: Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional
Chapter 11: Near-term Climate Change: Projections and Predictability
Chapter 12: Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility
Chapter 14: Climate Phenomena and their Relevance for Future Regional Climate Change
Why leak the draft report?
By Alec Rawls (email) [writing at http://www.stopgreensuicide.com/ ]
General principles
The ethics of leaking tax-payer funded documents requires weighing the “public’s right to know” against any harm to the public interest that may result. The press often leaks even in the face of extreme such harm, as when the New York Times published details of how the Bush administration was tracking terrorist financing with the help of the private sector Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), causing this very successful anti-terror program to immediately collapse.
That was a bad leak, doing great harm to expose something that nobody needed to know about. With the UN’s IPCC reports the calculus is reversed. UN “climate chief” Christina Figueres explains what is at stake for the public:
… we are inspiring government, private sector, and civil society to [make] the biggest transformation that they have ever undertaken. The Industrial Revolution was also a transformation, but it wasn’t a guided transformation from a centralized policy perspective. This is a centralized transformation that is taking place because governments have decided that they need to listen to science.
So may we please see this “science” on the basis of which our existing energy infrastructure is to be ripped out in favor of non-existent “green” energy? The only reason for secrecy in the first place is to enhance the UN’s political control over a scientific story line that is aimed explicitly at policy makers. Thus the drafts ought to fall within the reach of the Freedom of Information Act.
The Obama administration implicitly acknowledged this when it tried to evade FOIA by setting up private “backdoor channels” for communications with the IPCC. If NCAR’s Gerald Meehl (a lead author of AR5’s chapter on near-term climate change), has working copies of the draft report (and he’s only one of dozens of U.S. government researchers who would), then by law the draft report (now finished) should be available to the public.
The IPCC’s official reason for wanting secrecy (as they explained it to Steve McIntyre in January 2012) is so that criticisms of the drafts are not spread out across the internet but get funneled through the UN’s comment process. If there is any merit to that rationale it is now moot. The comment period ended November 30th so the comment process can no longer be affected by publication.
As for my personal confidentiality agreement with the IPCC, I regard that as vitiated by the systematic dishonesty of the report (“omitted variable fraud” as I called it in my FOD comments). This is a general principle of journalistic confidentiality: bad faith on one side breaks the agreement on the other. They can’t ask reviewers to become complicit in their dishonesty by remaining silent about it.
Then there is the specific content of the Second Order Draft where the addition of one single sentence demands the release of the whole. That sentence is an astounding bit of honesty, a killing admission that completely undercuts the main premise and the main conclusion of the full report, revealing the fundamental dishonesty of the whole.
Lead story from the Second Order Draft: strong evidence for solar forcing beyond TSI now acknowledged by IPCC
Compared to the First Order Draft, the SOD now adds the following sentence, indicated in bold (page 7-43, lines 1-5, emphasis added):
Many empirical relationships have been reported between GCR or cosmogenic isotope archives and some aspects of the climate system (e.g., Bond et al., 2001; Dengel et al., 2009; Ram and Stolz, 1999). The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link. We focus here on observed relationships between GCR and aerosol and cloud properties.
The Chapter 7 authors are admitting strong evidence (“many empirical relationships”) for enhanced solar forcing (forcing beyond total solar irradiance, or TSI), even if they don’t know what the mechanism is. This directly undercuts the main premise of the report, as stated in Chapter 8 (page 8-4, lines 54-57):
There is very high confidence that natural forcing is a small fraction of the anthropogenic forcing. In particular, over the past three decades (since 1980), robust evidence from satellite observations of the TSI and volcanic aerosols demonstrate a near-zero (–0.04 W m–2) change in the natural forcing compared to the anthropogenic AF increase of ~1.0 ± 0.3 W m–2.
The Chapter 8 authors (a different group than the Chapter 7 authors) are explicit here that their claim about natural forcing being small compared to anthropogenic forcing is based on an analysis in which the only solar forcing that is taken into account is TSI. This can be verified from the radiative forcing table on page 8-39 where the only solar variable included in the IPCC’s computer models is seen to be “solar irradiance.”
This analysis, where post-1980 warming gets attributed to the human release of CO2 on the grounds that it cannot be attributed to solar irradiance, cannot stand in the face of the Chapter 7 admission of substantial evidence for solar forcing beyond solar irradiance. Once the evidence for enhanced solar forcing is taken into account we can have no confidence that natural forcing is small compared to anthropogenic forcing.
The Chapter 8 premise that natural forcing is relatively small leads directly to the main conclusion of the entire report, stated in the first sentence of the Executive Summary (the very first sentence of the entire report): that advances since AR4 “further strengthen the basis for human activities being the primary driver in climate change” (p.1-2, lines 3-5). This headline conclusion is a direct descendant of the assumption that the only solar forcing is TSI, a claim that their own report no longer accepts.
The report still barely hints at the mountain of evidence for enhanced solar forcing, or the magnitude of the evidenced effect. Dozens of studies (section two here) have found between a .4 and .7 degree of correlation between solar activity and various climate indices, suggesting that solar activity “explains” in the statistical sense something like half of all past temperature change, very little of which could be explained by the very slight variation in TSI. At least the Chapter 7 team is now being explicit about what this evidence means: that some mechanism of enhanced solar forcing must be at work.
My full submitted comments (which I will post later) elaborate several important points. For instance, note that the Chapter 8 premise (page 8-4, lines 54-57) assumes that it is the change in the level of forcing since 1980, not the level of forcing, that would be causing warming. Solar activity was at historically high levels at least through the end of solar cycle 22 (1996), yet the IPCC is assuming that because this high level of solar forcing was roughly constant from 1950 until it fell off during solar cycle 23 it could not have caused post-1980 warming. In effect they are claiming that you can’t heat a pot of water by turning the burner to maximum and leaving it there, that you have to keep turning the flame up to get continued warming, an un-scientific absurdity that I have been writing about for several years (most recently in my post about Isaac Held’s bogus 2-box model of ocean equilibration).
The admission of strong evidence for enhanced solar forcing changes everything. The climate alarmists can’t continue to claim that warming was almost entirely due to human activity over a period when solar warming effects, now acknowledged to be important, were at a maximum. The final draft of AR5 WG1 is not scheduled to be released for another year but the public needs to know now how the main premises and conclusions of the IPCC story line have been undercut by the IPCC itself.
President Obama is already pushing a carbon tax premised on the fear that CO2 is causing dangerous global warming. Last week his people were at the UN’s climate meeting in Doha pretending that Hurricane Sandy was caused by human increments to CO2 as UN insiders assured the public that the next IPCC report will “scare the wits out of everyone” with its ramped-up predictions of human-caused global warming to come, but this is not where the evidence points, not if climate change is in any substantial measure driven by the sun, which has now gone quiet and is exerting what influence it has in the cooling direction.
The acknowledgement of strong evidence for enhanced solar forcing should upend the IPCC’s entire agenda. The easiest way for the UN to handle this disruptive admission would be to remove it from their final draft, which is another reason to make the draft report public now. The devastating admission needs to be known so that the IPCC can’t quietly take it back.
Will some press organization please host the leaked report?
Most of us have to worry about staying within cautiously written and cautiously applied terms-of-service agreements. That’s why I created this new website. If it gets taken down nothing else gets taken with it. Media companies don’t have this problem. They have their own servers and publishing things like the draft IPCC report is supposed to be their bailiwick.
If the press has First Amendment protection for the publication of leaked materials even when substantial national security interests are at stake (the Supreme Court precedent set in the Pentagon Papers case), then it can certainly republish a leaked draft of a climate science report where there is no public interest in secrecy. The leaker could be at risk (the case against Pentagon leaker Daniel Ellsberg was thrown out for government misconduct, not because his activity was found to be protected) but the press is safe, and their services would be appreciated.
United States taxpayers have funded climate science to the tune of well over 80 billion dollars, all channeled through the funding bureaucracy established by Vice President Albert “the end is nigh” Gore when he served as President Clinton’s “climate czar.” That Gore-built bureaucracy is still to this day striving to insure that not a penny of all those taxpayer billions ever goes to any researcher who is not committed to the premature conclusion that human contributions to atmospheric CO2 are causing dangerous global warming (despite the lack of any statistically significant warming for more than 15 years).
Acolytes of this bought “consensus” want to see what new propaganda their tax dollars have wrought and so do the skeptics. It’s unanimous, and an already twice-vetted draft is sitting now in thousands of government offices around the world. Time to fork it over to the people.
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UPDATE1: Andrew Revkin writes in a story at the NYT Dot Earth today:
It’s important, before anyone attacks Rawls for posting the drafts (this is distinct from his views on their contents), to consider that panel report drafts at various stages of preparation have been leaked in the past by people with entirely different points of view.
That was the case in 2000, when I was leaked a final draft of the summary for policy makers of the second science report from the panel ahead of that year’s round of climate treaty negotiations. As I explained in the resulting news story, “A copy of the summary was obtained by The New York Times from someone who was eager to have the findings disseminated before the meetings in The Hague.”
Here’s a question I sent tonight to a variety of analysts of the panel’s workings over the years:
The leaker, Alec Rawls, clearly has a spin. But I’ve long thought that I.P.C.C. was in a weird losing game in trying to boost credibility through more semi-open review while trying to maintain confidentiality at same time. I’m sympathetic to the idea of having more of the I.P.C.C. process being fully open (a layered Public Library of Science-style approach to review can preserve the sanity of authors) in this age of enforced transparency (WikiLeaks being the most famous example).
I’ll post answers as they come in.
Full story at DotEarth
==============================================================
UPDATE2: Alternative links for AR5 WG1 SOD. At each page click on the button that says “create download link,” then “click here to download”:
Summary for Policymakers
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363425211/SummaryForPolicymakers_WG1AR5-SPM_FOD_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 1: Introduction
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363425214/Ch1-Introduction_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch01_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 2: Observations: Atmosphere and Surface
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436270/Ch2_Obs-atmosur_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch02_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 3: Observations: Ocean
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436276/Ch3_Obs-oceans_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch03_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 4: Observations: Cryosphere
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436279/Ch4_obs-cryo_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch04_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 5: Information from Paleoclimate Archives
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436282/Ch5_Paleo_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch05_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 6: Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436285/Ch6_Carbonbio_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch06_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 7: Clouds and Aerosols
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436286/Ch7_Clouds-aerosols_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch07_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 8: Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363425217/Ch8_Radiative-forcing_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch08_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 8 Supplement
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436312/Ch8_supplement_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch08_SM_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 9: Evaluation of Climate Models
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436298/Ch9_models_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch09_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 10: Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436302/Ch10_attribution_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch10_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 11: Near-term Climate Change: Projections and Predictability
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436303/Ch11_near-term_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch11_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 12: Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363425220/Ch12_long-term_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch12_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 13: Sea Level Change
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363425221/Ch13_sea-level_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch13_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 14: Climate Phenomena and their Relevance for Future Regional Climate Change
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363425222/Ch14_future-regional_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch14_All_Final.pdf.html
Chapter 14 Supplement
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363436309/Ch14_supplement_WG1AR5_SOD_Ch14_SM_Final.pdf.html
Technical Summary
http://www.peejeshare.com/files/363425223/TechnicalSummary_WG1AR5-TS_FOD_All_Final.pdf.html
======================================================
UPDATE3: a large “all in one” RAR file has been created by a reader “hippo”
Link to the entire set of documents, as single RAR archive:
http://www.filedropper.com/wwwstopgreensuicidecom
And now a bittorrent magnet link:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:3f31ecb2a557732ea8d42e14b87aca7efb5dbcc7&dn=IPCCAR5&tr=http%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.cc.de%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.istole.it%3A80
reader “krischel” writes:
It’s a folder with each individual PDF in it.
If you have a torrent client like Transmission, you should be able to copy/paste open up that magnet URL and start downloading.
Replaced Link with the newer one. -ModE
==================================================
UPDATE4: 7:30AM PST 12/14/12 reactions are now coming in worldwide, see here, and the IPCC is going to issue a statement today.
UPDATE5: IPCC statement here: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/ar5/statement/Statement_WGI_AR5_SOD.pdf
Full text here in this WUWT post (easier reading)
georgi says:
December 13, 2012 at 3:09 pm
jolly good – not too worried about the slow connection now!
Zeke Hausfather says:
Its only a “game changing admission” if you ignore the following four paragraphs. e.g.:
Nope. Those paragraphs, in addition to being in cognitave dissonance inducing inconsistency with respect to the game changing admission, are loads of fun in themselves:
Although there is some evidence that ionization from cosmic rays may enhance aerosol nucleation in the free troposphere, there is medium evidence and high agreement that the cosmic ray-ionization mechanism is too weak to influence global concentrations of CCN or their change over the last century or during a solar cycle in any climatically significant way.
LOL High agreement from medium evidence? Demonstrates that the ‘agreement’ is not based on the evidence. “High agreement from medium evidence” is pretty much ‘global warming’ in a nutshell – except that it is mostly high agreement from low evidence, by IPCC’s own admission.
The lack of trend in the cosmic ray intensity over the last 50 years (Agee et al., 2012; McCracken and Beer, 2007) provides another strong arguement against the hypothesis of a major contribution of cosmic rays to ongoing climate change.
Handwaving. Patently unscientific handwaving. Exactly the same sort of patently unscientific handwaving that was used to dismiss the climatically significant solar contribution that is now grudgingly admitted.
Honest Kuhnians will recognize the flailing defense of the failing paradigm when they see it. Popperians are just happy to watch the freaking witch doctors finally starting to squirm.
It doesn’t even depend on whether GCR link is provable or not. In such a complex system as Sun/Atmosphere there could be all sorts of subtle mechanisms at work. Different wavelengths affecting different components at different heights, solar field and earth field interaction. We know so little about cloud formation.
To look at the TSI and say it hasn’t changed enough to affect the climate is naive at best.
Anthony, I think it would be appropriate to kindly ask Vincent Courtillot if he could make a guest post about his current research and where his conclusions are heading – the timing would be perfect. Among other things, it appears that he has identified a very strong solar relationship with known modes of atmospheric oscillation.
Zeke,
So there is no evidence of a link between temperature and clouds, or are clouds ignored because the problem is too hard?
Site is down
5oo (internal seever) error.
Such is all I get when I try to download any chapter.
Are there any copies available yet at high-bandwidth sites? We thank you for your courage but I advise you in the future to consider the logistical risks.
I don’t think this is a game changer at all. The Summary for Policymakers is all that the media and politicians read; as usual it’s full of dogmatic pronouncements about the near certaintainty of CAGW and the dire consequences which will ensue if we don’t hand our cash and sovereignity over to a pack of UN bureaucrats intent on world government! This hasn’t been about the Science for ages: it’s a political/religious movement akin to Islam in its zeal to control us all.
Download issues. Server Error 500.
I just upgraded the hosting account, which supposedly will increase the bandwidth considerably. Not sure when it will kick in.
Doug Allen seems to be right. Apparently Obama has not actually renewed his push for carbon taxes. I was misled by the title of the article: “Exxon backs Obama plan to impose climate change fees.” I should have written that Obama is being pushed to have another go at carbon taxes.
Ditto for my bit about the Obama delegation to COP18 in Doha claiming Sandy was caused by global warming. I knew Obama’s campaign had linked Sandy to global warming so I assumed the title “Doha delegation using hurricane Sandy as a call to action,” was about the U.S. delegation. My bad.
When the IPCC and the UN generally say science they mean the social sciences, not the hard sciences. Under the social sciences they can model based on theories and assumptions. They also mean education which is now classified as a social science as it has changed from being about instructing knowledge. Now it is about changing human behavior in the future.
The IPCC report is designed to change human behavior in the future based on theories of a different type of society and economy. I walked through this social science and education as transformative tools for what Figueres has in mind this summer after Anthony released his real temp data. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/if-reality-is-ignored-or-disregarded-when-do-we-become-a-state-against-its-people/
The Transformative change figures is referring to is the Belmont Challenge and the Future Earth Alliance I have been writing about since early summer. The FEA goes operational in 2013 and the UK and US are the leads in the Belmont Forum. But many other countries are involved as well. This IPCC report is meant to justify those machinations as “necessary.”
Right. In the sense that Doha, Rio, Cancun, and Copenhagen boondoggles become necessary once you get the fun experience.
Alex, Thank you. If there is legal trouble, I am ready to contribute.
Science at its best,
What a joke.
Dana Nuccitelli’s latest post at Skeptical Science leaves out 90% of the relevant information which the reader should understand. I’m sure IPCC AR5 did this as well.
Dana’s chart (which was published no less).
http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Nuccitelli_OHC_Data.jpg
But it leaves out 90% of the picture. This is what it is supposed to show when all the relevant information is included.
http://s16.postimage.org/mni8u7bvp/OHC_GHG_and_Missing_Energy.png
So, I think any comments made should be viewed in that light.
Fat Tony – I am equally cynical. I watch the posts when the NYTimes comes out (yesterday) to say that snow-skiing is going to be a thing of the past. 200 posters joined in bemoaning the permanent snow loss (one-year) in NH and immediately brought up the storm Sandy as unimpeachable evidence of AGW.
My interest has turned lately to looking for a link with Islam. It seems to me that environmentalism as an ideology is as significant a threat to Western Civ as Islam. So I am expecting there will be growing political links between the two. I still haven’t worked out how, except to be sure that streams of money and power are behind it.
The website seems to be done for the moment, How about putting everything in a torrent?
What science? This is the Gospel according to the CAGW church. No heresy allowed or the thought police will come.
“We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work.”
Ah the smell of McCarthyism in the morning!
Usual self-serving claptrap. I’m a European taxpayer, and I didn’t actually want the report early – I wanted it issued in a controlled fashion, properly presented. But then we Europeans don’t matter, do we? And besides, this Alec Rawls guy has made his name by climbing over the backs of all the other team members, so that’s OK then.
REPLY: Now we know who put the “twerp” in Antwerp 😉 – Anthony
Mirror? Torrent?
Exactly Anthony – no good answer, so issue an insult, business as usual!
REPLY: It was humor for the humorless. note the 😉 – A
Same here, I DL the first 3 chapters and then zilch.Assume they had sent round the extraordinary rendition team. Hope it’s back on line soonest.
Server is down. 🙁
I’m guessing that the Summary for Policymakers can be summarised as
Chapter 13 – Sea Level Change
See fig. 13.17 (page 106 of 110). Acceleration of sea level rise – – begins immediately.
I am also an European taxpayer. And I would like to see this IPCC crap exposed as soon as possible as the crap it is. Together with all its fantasies, machinations and public scaring about the greatest hoax of all time.
As a consequence of the previous IPCC reports, I am now paying 0.12 Eurocent tax for every kWh I use, and the sum (energy + tax) is being taxed at 21% for VAT.
Thanks a lot, the energy itself is 7 Eurocents/kWh?
(7+12)*1,21= 23 Eurocents/kWh
A more than 3 fold increase of the bare cost of the energy I consume?
No way.