The WUWT Hotsheet for Monday Sept 30th, 2013

(Personal note – apologies for the light posting today, I’m overwhelmed with work, and exhausted from overwork – Anthony)

The IPCC AR5 falls flat 

Dr. Judith Curry has been making some heavy hitting commentary, we’ll lead with some of those:

IPCC’s pause ‘logic’

Well here it is, the pause discussion is buried in Box 9.2 of the IPCC Working Group I Report.

The Final Draft SPM summed it up correctly as:

“Models do not generally reproduce the observed reduction in surface warming trend over the last 10 –15 years.”

Which of course disappeared in the Final version of the SPM.  Before your head starts spinning trying to make sense of the WGI Report text, here is the main summary point IMO:

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IPCC diagnosis – permanent paradigm paralysis

Diagnosis: paradigm paralysis, caused by motivated reasoning, oversimplification, and consensus seeking; worsened and made permanent by a vicious positive feedback effect at the climate science-policy interface. 

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How the IPCC forgot to mention the pause

[Marotzke] attributed the oversight to a tendency of each group working on each of the 14 chapters to rely on some other chapter to deal with the issue. And anyone who was thinking about it at all thought some other chapter should handle the issue. – CS Monitor

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“some delegates wanted to remove all references to a slowdown…[perhaps] felt it would be seized on by climate-change deniers”

Has the U.N. Climate Panel Now Outlived Its Usefulness? by Fred Pearce: Yale Environment 360

…It is not called an “intergovernmental panel” for nothing, and every last nation had to agree to the text before it was published.

So is this science or politics?

…

Another contentious topic was how the report should deal with the recent warming hiatus. The draft acknowledged the scientists’ concerns and noted that climate models “do not generally reproduce the observed reduction in surface warming trend over the last 10-15 years.” This was reportedly met with opposition from some delegates who wanted to remove all references to a slowdown. Some argued that the hiatus had not lasted long enough to be considered a temperature trend. Perhaps they also felt it would be seized on by climate-change deniers.

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David Keith, a Harvard University professor who recently resigned as an author of the IPCC report, says “The IPCC is showing typical signs of middle age, including weight gain, a growing rigidity of viewpoint, and overconfidence in its methods. It did a great job in the early days, but it’s become ritualized and bureaucratic, issuing big bulk reports that do little to answer the hard questions facing policymakers.” It needs, he says, “a reinvention.”

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Eisenhower was right.

Judith Curry: Gov’t grants have caused IPCC science to be ‘torqued in unfortunate direction’

Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth And Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, says the IPCC is taking a huge credibility hit over the hiatus – and its pronouncement that it is 95 percent certain that human activity is responsible for most global warming.

“I’m not happy with the IPCC,” she told Fox News. “I think it has torqued the science in an unfortunate direction.”

That torquing, she suggests, is because the money in climate science (the funding, that is) is tied to embellishing the IPCC narrative, especially the impacts of global warming.

Read more…

See my essay about Eisenhower’s prescient warning here

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The Political Science of Global Warming

The U.N.’s latest climate-change report should be its last

By Rupert Darwall, WSJ

© Dave Reede/First Light/Corbis

“Human influence extremely likely to be the dominant cause of observed warming since the middle of the last century,” was the headline from Friday’s release of the first instalment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth assessment report. “Extremely likely”—indicating a 95%-100% likelihood—was ratcheted up one notch from the 2007 fourth assessment report’s “very likely.” Yet compared to 2007, the IPCC widened its estimate of the responsiveness of the climate system to carbon dioxide by reducing the lower band to a 1.5°C increase from 2°C, qualifying the new estimate as only “likely.”

This is a glaring discrepancy. How can the IPCC be more confident that more than half the temperature rise since the mid-20th century is caused by greenhouse-gas emissions when it is less sure of the climatic impact of carbon dioxide? The explanation is that IPCC reports, especially the summaries for policymakers, are primarily designed for political consumption. And as if on cue, British Prime Minister David Cameron commented on the IPCC report, “If someone said there is a 95% chance that your house might burn down, even if you are in the 5% that doesn’t agree with it, you still take out the insurance.

http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2-341868/

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Main AR5 WG1 Report published | The IPCC Report

Unfortunately, the Changes document linked above doesn’t make much sense at all, and seems to contain a lot of mistakes.

…

I suppose this shows that the stories of IPCC delegates being over-tired and not getting enough sleep were all true.

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IPCC in denial. “Just-so” excuses use ocean heat to hide their failure. « JoNova

Now that the plateau in temperatures has lasted for 15 years, everyone, even IPCC lead authors, can see the “90% certain” models were 98% wrong. So the IPCC now claims the heat went into the deep abyss, which they didn’t predict, can’t measure accurately, and, even by the best estimates we have, has not been anywhere near enough warming to explain the missing energy.

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Die Klimazwiebel: My problems with the IPCC report

Generally, it would have been a good idea to compare the major messages from the 2007 report with those of the 2013 report and say where changes in assessment were made and why. The IPCC shuns such an exercise, and at its peril. The reason why it doesn’t want to do this arguably (here I am offering a speculation) has to do with the desire to be perceived as sober, consistent, even infallible. Giving hints at a lack of confidence, the IPCC seems to assume, could provoke critical questions from the audience (and the heavy use of the word ‘confidence’ in the Summary for Policy Makers indicates that the IPCC wants to hammer home this exact point, that it has confidence…). But such a move gives rise to suspicion in the first place, as most of the interested audience can check for themselves what was said and how it was said last time, and if there are discrepancies between the two. So in reality this strategy is bound to backfire.

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Climate change? What climate change? | Columnists | Opinion | Edmonton Sun

…the key admission in the IPCC report is, “There is a lack of agreement” on just how sensitive the climate is to carbon dioxide.

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Climate Activists Need to Dial Back on the Panic

Instead of enacting phenomenally expensive policies, we need to come up with low-cost solutions to global warming that all nations can embrace

Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2013/09/30/climate-activists-need-to-dial-back-on-the-panic/#ixzz2gPz2oADi

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IPCC is more about Politics than Science

The science debate is over. They lost.

Decades ago they proposed a theory that Earth’s temperature is controlled by the 0.004% trace of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

This theory was used to make predictions by at least 73 computer models. Thirty years of observations has proven every prediction wrong. Therefore their theory is wrong. That is how science works.

Now, faced with collapse of their theory and de-funding of their activities, the alarmist crew have switched to politics.

The IPCC Summary document released last week with all the hoopla of a political convention is a political document produced by consensus. It was negotiated by a faceless committee of international bureaucrats for their government masters, most of whom have a vested interest in proving there is a continuing problem needing international taxes and controls.

Consensus is the tool of politics. Public opinion is where the next climate battle will be fought.

They will lose again.

Viv Forbes,

Rosewood Qld Australia

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SUPREME COURT:

Justices to consider review of EPA greenhouse gas rules

http://www.eenews.net/stories/1059987993

In what could become a marquee environmental case of the Supreme Court’s next term, the justices on Monday are expected to consider reviewing a lower court ruling that upheld U.S. EPA’s regulations to reduce heat-trapping gases.

Nine petitions are asking the court to reverse aspects of an appellate court’s June 2012 ruling that backed EPA’s first rules following the Supreme Court’s landmark Massachusetts v. EPA decision, which instructed the agency to regulate greenhouse gases as harmful pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

Some prominent environmental lawyers believe the court will grant certiorari to — or agree to review — some part of the petitions. The decision could come as early as Tuesday, less than two weeks after the Obama administration proposed regulations to cut greenhouse gas emissions at new power plants.

Richard Lazarus, an environmental law professor at Harvard Law School, wrote recently that “the odds of a cert. grant remain significant, mostly because of … superficial trappings of cert.-worthiness.”

Writing in the nonpartisan Environmental Law Institute’s Environmental Forum, Lazarus said the number of petitions is unusually high and more than 80 interested parties are asking the high court to take the case.

He also pointed out that 17 states have signed onto the effort, a significant number considering that the dozen states that supported greenhouse gas regulation in 2007 played an important role in persuading the high court to review Massachusetts v. EPA.

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Mike’s ‘hidden decline’ found in new study: Tree-ring analysis shows no warming in eastern Mediterranean past 900 years

The Register reports: There’s interesting news on the climate beat this week, especially given the background of the just-released IPCC AR5 report – which blames humanity for warming the planet. A new, comprehensive study examining temperatures in the Eastern Mediterranean region over the last 900 years indicates that global warming and associated climate changes actually […]

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Oh, that’s gotta hurt:

‘Modern Warming Trend Cannot Be Found’ In New Climate Study

There’s interesting news on the climate beat this week, especially given the background of the just-released IPCC AR5 report – which blames humanity for warming the planet. A new, comprehensive study examining temperatures in the Eastern Mediterranean region over the last 900 years indicates that global warming and associated climate changes actually haven’t happened there at all.

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According to a Helmholtz Centre announcement highlighting Dr Heinrich’s latest research:

For the first time a long temperature reconstruction on the basis of stable carbon isotopes in tree rings has been achieved for the eastern Mediterranean. An exactly dated time series of almost 900 year length was established, exhibiting the medieval warm period, the little ice age between the 16th and 19th century as well as the transition into the modern warm phase … [however] the modern warming trend cannot be found in the new chronology.

Heinrich and his colleagues write:

The twentieth century warming trend found elsewhere could not be identified in our proxy record, nor was it found in the corresponding meteorological data used for our study.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/30/global_warming_didnt_happen_at_all_according_to_new_treering_study/

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What sad, hate filled little men they are:

.@MichaelEMann I get less hate mail than I used to. I think the number of skeptics declined as they die of old age/drool shorts out keybrd

— Andrew Dessler (@AndrewDessler) September 30, 2013