Believe It or Not There Are Plans for a 6th Assessment Report from the IPCC

Guest Post by Bob Tisdale

The IPCC press release IPCC takes decisions on future work dated 17 February 2015 begins:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has taken a series of decisions to make its reports more accessible and involve developing countries more closely in its work.

The decisions, following a review of the future work of the IPCC over the past year and a half, pave the way for the IPCC to prepare its next cycle of reports, which will be initiated by elections for a new Bureau and Chair in October 2015.

“We have taken stock of our future. We have been through a detailed process to examine how to continually improve our work, to make it as relevant and useful as possible, not only for government policymakers but for society at large,” said Acting Chair Ismail El Gizouli.

Further along they write:

It also decided to continue preparing comprehensive assessment reports every five to seven years, which also cover regional aspects of climate change, taking into account the work of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in determining its future reports and their timing.

Let me make a couple of predictions about the content of the 6^th Assessment Report (AR6).  If emissions of greenhouse gases continue to increase as expected, the IPCC will basically tell us once again:

• Global surface temperatures will rise
• So will sea levels
• Droughts will occur in some places and floods in others, but they’re not sure where
• Climate will change

And there will continue to be few to no changes in the wide uncertainty ranges.

What an incredible waste of money!!!  We got the message after the first report.  Assuming those continuously unchanging predictions are correct, those tens of billions of research dollars would be better spent on adaptation.