UN IPCC AR5 report infected with fatal technical and procedural flaws

UN report’s fatal flaws destroy credibility of WGII and WGIII findings

Guest essay by Larry Hamlin

The UN IPCC AR5 latest climate assessment process comprising WGI, WGII and WGIII reports is complete. This process includes many hundreds of authors and reviewers, consideration of thousands of papers and ten of thousands of pages of reports, associated technical summaries and appendices. Yet amazingly with all this extraordinary expenditure time, effort and expense the report itself documents a monumental failure which has infected the process with fatal technical and procedural flaws which destroy the credibility of the WGII and WGIII findings.

The genesis of the fatal technical and procedural flaws are contained in the WGI report which documents the failure of the climate model global temperature projections to agree with observed global temperature measurements.

The WGI report then performs a technical analysis demonstrating and documenting that the climate models cannot be relied upon to provide reasonable projections of future global temperatures even to the year 2035 let alone the year 2100. As a consequence WGI devises an estimate of expected but lower future global temperature increases to 2035 using “expert assessment” instead of relying upon climate model exaggerated higher temperature projections.

The WGI report need to create a non-climate model derived global temperature estimate for future temperatures is neatly summarized and documented in Chapter 11 Figure 11.25a, b and c.

The WGI report goes even further in demonstrating and documenting the limitations and shortcomings of the climate models by highlighting in the Technical Summary description the lack of accuracy and precision of climate model temperature computer output scenarios by admitting  “The  scenarios should be considered plausible and illustrative, and do not have probabilities attached to them” in Box TS.6.

These critical determinations from the WGI report which define and document the highly significant technical shortcomings and limitations of the climate models are completely ignored in the WGII and WGIII reports which proceed to utilize these flawed models as the primary basis upon which climate risk assessments are determined. This action by WGII and WGIII reports constitutes both a monumental technical as well as procedural fatal flaw which undermines and invalidates the climate risk findings contained in these reports.

The UN IPCC AR5 report findings inappropriately rely on flawed climate models which exaggerate higher global temperatures as described and addressed here (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/07/un-wgii-report-relies-on-exaggerated-climate-model-results/).

Additionally the AR5 reports are grounded in speculative conjecture based on well documented climate model analytical limitations instead of solid science as described here ( http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/15/un-ipcc-ar5-climate-reports-conjecture-disguised-as-certainty/).

These huge flaws and limitations make the use of the UN IPCC AR5 reports for purposes of framing government climate policy actions completely inappropriate and unjustified.