IPCC Draft Lowers Global Warming Projections on Climate Sensitivity
“That report is going to scare the wits out of everyone,” said Yvo de Boer recently. He is a former United Nations chief climate negotiator and was talking about the forthcoming fifth assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). With two months to go before the assessment is to be published, however, one sign suggests it might be less terrifying than it could have been. [The draft IPCC report] seems to reflect a growing sense that climate sensitivity may have been overestimated in the past and that the science is too uncertain to justify a single estimate of future rises. If this does turn out to be the case, it would have significant implications for policy. —The Economist, 20 July 2013
The next United Nations climate report will “scare the wits out of everyone” and should provide the impetus needed for the world to finally sign an agreement to tackle global warming, the former head of the UN negotiations said. Yvo de Boer, the UN climate chief during the 2009 Copenhagen climate change talks, said his conversations with scientists working on the next report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested the findings would be shocking. “That report is going to scare the wits out of everyone,” Mr de Boer said in the only scheduled interview of his visit to Australia. “I’m confident those scientific findings will create new political momentum.” –Peter Hannam, Brisbane Times, 7 November 2012
The wave of new evidence of low climate sensitivity has presented the IPCC with a dilemma. They could try to bluff it out, an approach that could be terminal given the widespread reporting of the new science in the media. Alternatively they could ‘fess up’. This too could be extremely damaging, but perhaps might not be the end of them. Being good bureaucrats they have gone for the option that is most likely to lead to their survival. –Andrew Montford, Bishop Hill, 18 July 2013
At C02 concentrations of between 425 parts per million and 485 ppm, temperatures in 2100 would be 1.3-1.7°C above their pre-industrial levels. That seems lower than the IPCC’s previous assessment, made in 2007. Then, it thought concentrations of 445-490 ppm were likely to result in a rise in temperature of 2.0-2.4°C. —The Economist, 20 July 2013
Rapid melting of polar ice sheets may be due to short-lived natural events rather than climate change, scientists said. New research suggests more time is needed to predict the likely impact of global warming and ice loss on sea levels. –John von Radowitz, AFP, 15 July 2013
It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally. It is further incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases. –Roger Pielke Jr., testimony to the US Senate, 18 July 2013
A paper published by the Danish Meteorological Institute finds a remarkable correlation of Arctic sea ice observations over the past 500 years to “the solar cycle length, which is a measure of solar activity. A close correlation of high significance is found between the two patterns, suggesting a link from solar activity to the Arctic Ocean climate.” The paper adds to several others demonstrating that Arctic sea ice extent and climate is controlled by natural variations in solar activity, ocean & atmospheric oscillations, winds & storm activity, not man-made CO2. —The Hockey Schtick, 17 July 2013
Current general circulation climate models (GCM) to be used in the AR5 IPCC Report in 2013, fail to reconstruct observed climatic oscillations. The proposed empirical model outperforms the GCMs by better hind-casting the observed 1850-2012 climatic patterns. It is found that: about 50-60% of the warming observed since 1850 and since 1970 was induced by natural oscillations likely resulting from harmonic astronomical forcings that are not yet included in the GCMs. –Nicola Scafetta, Solar and planetary oscillation control on climate change.
The science journal Nature said only last week that the global temperature standstill “is one of the biggest mysteries in climate science.” Just like in Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition nobody expected the current standstill in global surface temperature. –David Whitehouse, The Observatory, 19 July 2013
Thanks to The GWPF and Dr. Benny Peiser for this compilation.
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There are so many misleading half truths in that chart one hardly knows where to begin. I hope they publish it exactly as is. I’d take the time to write a full blown expose on it if they do. They didn’t even label it properly, they’ve got co2 emissions where they meant co2 concentrations. Beyond that:
1. They math works out to CO2’s net effects being exponential rather than logarithmic. Good luck finding ANY data to support such a notion.
2. They express warming over pre-industrial which is about 280 ppm and over a century ago and about 1 degrees lower than today. How about expressing things compared to temps NOW and CO2 NOW? That would make (for example) the first line in the chart read 0.3 to 0.7 instead of 1.3 to 1.7! They’ve essentially taken all the warming of the last 100 years and included it in the chart, implying that it is future warming when in fact it is something that has already happened. I don’t care how future temps compare to 1920, I care about how future temps compare to TODAY!
3. The chart goes all the way up to 1000 pppm by 2100. Has anyone stopped to figure out how much fossil fuel consumption that actually is? We’re at 400 ppm today, and going up by about 2 ppm per year. At current rates, that’s 300 years to get to 1000 ppm. We’d have to increase emissions by a factor of 3.5 TIMES to get to 1000 ppm by 2100. Actually more, because the biosphere and other sinks would compensate by increasing absorption rates. Rough guess, we’d have to start burning about 5 TIMES as much fossil fuel as we are now, and we’d have to start TODAY. Oil prices are way down right now because consumption is down and there’s a glut on the market. We’d have to quintuple production and burn 80% of it just for the purpose of burning it in order to get anywhere NEAR 1000 ppm by 2100.
Good luck with that chart IPCC. I dare you to publish it.
Apparently not the only thing exaggerated
http://www.thegwpf.org/ipcc-chairmans-fake-phd/
thing, thing, thing
“[The draft IPCC report] seems to reflect a growing sense that climate sensitivity may have been overestimated in the past and that the science is too uncertain to justify a single estimate of future rises. If this does turn out to be the case, it would have significant implications for policy.”
And huge implications for science. They have to explain the “overestimation.” That requires them to articulate something about the relationship between model and data. Anything they say will open an avenue for scientific criticism of their work. That will be a huge advance for climate science. If they try to say nothing, just bluff their way through, then the image of the Wizard of Oz saying “Ignore the man behind the curtain” becomes ever sharper and more accessible to the public.
JimS,
So evidently, the Earth was 3 C. warmer even without AGW GHG. Wonder why that happened? And if the last interglacial was 4 or 6 meters higher, then most of present fertile farming deltas would be flooded.
http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/why-are-sea-levels-so-low
Sounds like a good time to buy Siberian and North Canadian real estate and sell low lying land.
I think they’ve already scared the wits out of people who didn’t have many to start with. Now they’re getting diminishing returns from those who have a full set and can easily spot their Lysenko-style crap-science. They may be taking their chips off the present CO2 levels as a driver of climate and putting them on acidification (“Ooooooo! Acid!”). It’s all politics; little or no actual science is involved.
Some scientists’ recent views I found should be quoted are on my blogsite at http://t.co/vZKx895Hty amongst other considerations, including some IPCC revelations in my post of 04 October 2011
It’s a good sign that the Economist is showing signs of AGW scepticism. The Economist is an excellent publication, but they have in the past had a blind spot over AGW.
The most striking comment in the Economist article is (para 5): “…There are several caveats. The table comes from a draft version of the report, and could thus change. It was put together by the IPCC working group on mitigating climate change, rather than the group looking at physical sciences…..”. In other words, look forward to the usual IPCC forked tongue announcements for which best see Donna Laframboise’s book “The Delinquent Teenager, who was mistaken for the world’s top climate expert”. As to ‘climate models’ – I couldn’t find a single one yet, viz http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/snippets-questions-2-climate-models.html
I was looking for a new source of stupid pills — looks like I finally found the factory!
REPLY: odd that you’d need to take stupid pills, but given your comment, I guess they are fast acting – Anthony
The extreme warming prediction (3C warming for a doubling of atmospheric CO2) should have be replaced by the lukewarm prediction (less than 1C warming for a doubling of atmospheric CO2), four or five years ago based on observations.
The yearly statements that the science is settled and all right thinking people must support spending trillions of dollars on scams only works until the public and media realizes the scams are scams and the planet is cooling rather than warming.
Perhaps the IPCC can issue a statement that they were just kidding.
I am still struggling to even imagine what the public and scientific community reaction would be to global cooling. How can the scientific community back track after all the name calling.
Greenland ice temperature, last 11,000 years determined from ice core analysis, Richard Alley’s paper.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
If there is significant cooling will the Noble prize be retracted?
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
Well, temperatures are going to have start increasing at some point soon if we are going to reach +3.25C by the year 2100, the previous IPCC forecast.
The new IPCC RCP 6.0 scenario, the most likely one, has CO2 reaching 670 ppm by 2100 so the new numbers are still around +3.0C by 2100 in this draft. The average of the models in this scenario is still around +3.25 so they haven’t really changed anything.
They are STILL forecasting the recent flatness of temps to be a temporary phenomenon. Wake me up when the trend turns positive.
davidmhoffer says:
July 19, 2013 at 11:20 am
Good points about the 1000ppm at 2100. The other point to consider is technology and innovation. Who knows what efficiencies or inventions will be around in say 2050 that might mean we never get to 1000ppm. Imagine the average person living in 1900 – could they have imagined sports cars, fighter jets, man on the Moon, smartphones, internet, Mars landers etc.? There is also the issue of gas fracking in the US which has allowed it to halt it emissions with little pain I do believe.
Oh and world population should have stabilized by then. See falling fertility rates around the world. Mexico is a startling example.
The reason why the climate sensitivity to CO2 must be seriously overestimated by the IPCC AGW models is because the natural climate variability has been underestimated. Essentially it is possible to detect oscillations at multiple scales from the decadal to the millennial one that the current AGW models fail to reproduce.
For example, while these models would be consistent with Mann’s Hockey Stick picture claiming a very little pre-industrial variability which implies that most (90+%) of the post 1900 warming was induced by anthropogenic emission with a necessity of having a climate sensitivity around 3 C, more recent paleoclimatic reconstructions show a far larger pre-industrial variability with a warmer MWP and cooler LIA. This pattern can be reproduced only with a far stronger solar contribution to climatic changes which would necessarily imply a lower contribution from anthropogenic GHG with the resulting that the climate sensitivity to CO2 must be significantly reduced.
By carefully identify the natural component of climate change, which is apparently made of specific numerous oscillations induced by specific solar/astronomical cycles it is possible to calculate that the most likely climate sensitivity is 1.35 C with a error bar varying between 0.9 and 2 C. This implies using the same IPCC emission scenarios, a 2000-2100 projected warming ranging between 0.3 C and 1.6 C , which is significantly lower than the IPCC GCM ensemble mean projected warming of 1.1 C to 4.1 C.
My proposed model also well reconstructs the temperature standstill since 2000. See my web-page
http://people.duke.edu/~ns2002/#astronomical_model_1
The above issues are extensively discussed in my new just published paper (an invited review) that has been linked in the article of this post.
Scafetta N., 2013. Solar and planetary oscillation control on climate change: hind-cast, forecast and a comparison with the CMIP5 GCMs. Energy & Environment 24(3-4), 455–496.
http://people.duke.edu/~ns2002/pdf/Scafetta_EE_2013.pdf
ABSTRACT
Global surface temperature records (e.g. HadCRUT4) since 1850 are characterized
by climatic oscillations synchronous with specific solar, planetary and lunar
harmonics superimposed on a background warming modulation. The latter is
related to a long millennial solar oscillation and to changes in the chemical
composition of the atmosphere (e.g. aerosol and greenhouse gases). However,
current general circulation climate models, e.g. the CMIP5 GCMs, to be used in
the AR5 IPCC Report in 2013, fail to reconstruct the observed climatic
oscillations. As an alternate, an empirical model is proposed that uses: (1) a
specific set of decadal, multidecadal, secular and millennial astronomic harmonics
to simulate the observed climatic oscillations; (2) a 0.45 attenuation of the GCM
ensemble mean simulations to model the anthropogenic and volcano forcing
effects. The proposed empirical model outperforms the GCMs by better hindcasting
the observed 1850-2012 climatic patterns. It is found that: (1) about 50-
60% of the warming observed since 1850 and since 1970 was induced by natural
oscillations likely resulting from harmonic astronomical forcings that are not yet
included in the GCMs; (2) a 2000-2040 approximately steady projected
temperature; (3) a 2000-2100 projected warming ranging between 0.3 C and 1.6
C , which is significantly lower than the IPCC GCM ensemble mean projected
warming of 1.1 C to 4.1 C ; (4) an equilibrium climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling
centered in 1.35 C and varying between 0.9 C and 2.0 C.
*************
Said the above, however, it is unlikely that the IPCC will change now his position. It is too late. The IPCC would need new climate models different from the CMIP5 one that it is using, which are demonstrated to fail. At most the IPCC may on one side use the CMIP5 to push the alarm, on the other side write somewhere that the climate sensitivity may be lower than what used by the current CMIP5 models because of recent studies. In doing that the IPCC will simply introduce a scientific “contradiction” in his report, that few policy makers may notice.
This “science is not settled” and “climate sensitivity may be low, not high” notice by “The Economist” will reach a wide audience. Thanks, Anthony.
I am waiting for the “team” (TM IPCC) to discover that earth climate is that of a water world.
Soon this headline will be trumpeted forth from science magazine, bloviating as to how water and its phase changes dominates and moderates the climate, with many wails of doom and gloom as to how we are all going to drown.
Closely followed by the UN regrouping the IPCC to focus on banning DiHydrogen Monoxide.
Sarc? I am no longer sure. Seems if it is in a position of authority, it is probably a member of the idiocracy.
We have heard how CO2 emissions lead to other effects that multiply the original warming effect. If the effects reverse so that reinforcing factors become mitigating factors that overwhelm the primary drivers, then how can anyone do any statistical projections at all with the data that we have? What reason do we have for assuming that this is not the case?
“Ha, just can’t resist after reading the last bit coming from that guy ;-)”
The comic irony is that *everyone* expected the Spanish Inquisition, by law they had to give 30 days notice……
Chairman Pachauri has already stated that there’s been no discernible warming trend for 17 years. The IPCC is making a serious CYA maneuver, in light of the overwhelming evidence that the climate of our fair planet is not conforming to their wild fantasies. Not to mention the fact that more and more people are fed up with the BS. As Maxwell Smart would say: Sorry about that.
Graphs and links to measurement data for the five reporting agencies are at http://endofgw.blogspot.com/
IPCC AR6
At C02 concentrations of between 425 parts per million and 485 ppm, temperatures in 2100 would be .13-.17°C (or not) above their pre-industrial levels. That seems lower than the IPCC’s previous assessment, made in 2013. Then, it thought concentrations of 445-490 ppm were likely to result in a rise in temperature of 1.3-1.7°C. –The Economist, 20 July 2019
The IPCC can gradually lower their prediction to zero over many years to avoid and delay acknowledging CO2 has no effect at all.
All the worlds problems are caused by Global Warming and too much CO2.
Rebellions
Hot summers,
Droughts,
Floods,
Arctic melting
Glaciers melting,
Hurricanes,
Tornadoes,
Extreme snow,
The Global Financial Crisis (no…, that’s not one of them, Are you sure? I think I read it somewhere. NO!… Ok).
So If I burn less fuel, recycle properly, eat less meat, and economize that will fix all of the above?
Mmmmm.
I’ve heard insurance salesmen give better stories.
like every previous Climate junket, it will be a fudge. the report will go something along the lines of: CO2 does warm the planet (but not as much as previously thought) and that we should continue to reduce CO2, that higher taxes have worked, that no-one (ie scientists and eco-loons) deliberately misled anyone. the end result will be that Western economies will have suffered, people will have died as a result of green policies, we will be left paying even higher taxes to fix the damage caused by green policies while those responsible slope off with their ill-gotten gains, pensions and reputations intact.
far-fetched? Not really; just think of the acid rain scare, ALAR, global cooling, the fitting of CO2 producing catalytic converters, etc etc etc – no-one called to account, least of the scaremongers
You might want to read this:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/ar5/statement/statement_wg3_table.pdf
Rattus, like many people, I am not interested in clicking on links with no context except “read this”. You need to lift your game.