The IPCC; Never Has So Much Been Made Out of So Little by So Many at So Great A Cost

(Apologies to Winston Churchill the brave Battle of Britain people.)

Guest opinion: Dr. Tim Ball

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the people who formulated the structure that directed their research, constantly manipulated the data and the methods to predetermine the results. It began with the definition of climate change given to them as Article 1 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This involved overstating and misrepresenting the amount of atmospheric CO2 currently, and in the past. It also included misrepresentation of its movement through the so-called carbon cycle.

You can pick any segment of the Carbon Cycle they show in Figure 1 (Their Figure 6-1, Fifth Assessment Report) and none of it is based on actual measures, that is real data; everything is an estimate and can’t qualify even as an educated guess.

Figure 1

As they explain,

Numbers represent reservoir mass, also called ‘carbon stocks’ in PgC (1 PgC = 1015 gC) and annual carbon exchange fluxes (in PgC yr–1)

What they should say is that every single number is a very crude estimate biased to support their claims of an unproven hypothesis that human CO2 is causing global warming (AGW). They must provide a bold disclaimer that they have no actual measurements of anything, there is no real data. They provide a vague disclaimer as Box 2.1 “Uncertainty in Observational Records” in Chapter 2 of the Physical Science Basis Report but this is misleading and deflects from the real issue.

The vast majority of historical (and modern) weather observations were not made for climate monitoring purposes.

So, even the weather data is inadequate or inappropriate. They must also say that virtually none of the other data even exists.

The black numbers represent the estimated reservoir mass and exchange fluxes for the time prior to the Industrial era (1750). That in itself is ridiculous. Even today, we have no idea of fossil fuel reserves. Saudi Arabia has consistently refused to disclose the level of its reserves. You would think people who evolved from the Limits to Growth crowd, would know with their failed “peak oil” contention not to rely on any global resource statistic. A standard project in my geopolitics class was for students to determine the amount of fossil fuel reserves in Canada and the world. They were stunned by the range of numbers they get. When you consider that the two supposedly most accurate estimates of world population (the US Census and the UN) differ by almost 6 million people (2011), you get a measure of the problem. We don’t have even close to accurate estimates today, let alone 268 years ago. But then, these are the people that tell you, with a frightening and utterly unjustified degree of certainty, that they know what the global temperature was in 1750.

I will only look at one segment of the diagram labelled Vegetation and Soils. I challenge anybody to give me within even 20 percent an estimate of the extent of world forests in 1750. However, the IPCC do just that.

The terrestrial biosphere reservoir contains carbon in organic compounds in vegetation living biomass (450 to 650 PgC; Prentice et al., 2001) and in dead organic matter in litter and soils (1500 to 2400 PgC; Batjes, 1996).

Remember, this was close to the nadir of the Little Ice Age (LIA). My research for central Canada, based on accurate maps, showed that the tree-line at the northern edge of the Boreal forest moved some 200 km between 1772 and 1972. This is a movement of 1 km per year in one of the harshest growing environments in the world. It also represents a massive addition to the biomass in just this vegetative type

One of the great natural paradoxes is that the tropical rainforest exists on the most impoverished soils in the world. Understanding why this occurs underscores why the IPCC claims are so wrong. Most people know there are two basic tree classifications, coniferous evergreen, and deciduous – leaves, no leaves. The tropical rainforest is both. It is never without leaves, but leaves are falling all the time and constantly being replaced. Without this condition, the forest could not exist. The climate has an annual precipitation of 2000 mm or more and year-round temperatures averaging between 20 and 30°C.

These conditions literally leach the soil of most minerals leaving only iron and some aluminum. This is the red laterite soils of tropical regions (Figure 2). Soils that if exposed by removal of vegetation, either erode rapidly in the heavy rain or bake iron hard in the tropical sun.

Figure 2: Laterite

Basically, the rainforest exists because it perpetuates itself. The leaves are continually falling and rot quickly to become nutrients for the tree. The two largest natural sources of CO2 are the oceans and the decomposing vegetation, the IPCC’s “dead organic matter.” There is a disturbing analogy to the IPCC process in this sequence. It produces the rotten data on which it perpetuates itself.

People of the tropical rainforests practice a unique agriculture that describes the process, “slash and burn.” They clear a small area and burn the material to provide enough minerals for a couple of years of cropping. They then abandon the area to allow regeneration on the small amount of organic material left behind. In the 20^th century, three attempts to create large-scale agriculture in the tropical rainforests failed primarily because of ignoring the inexorable infertility of the soils.

The first was Henry Ford’s project to grow rubber trees in plantations in Brazil. It centered on a community called Fordlandia. The second failure was known as the Groundnut Scheme and involved a British government plan to ensure a supply of the most important agricultural product in the world, vegetable oil. Groundnut is the British name for peanut. Begun in 1950 in Tanganyika (Tanzania today), it lasted 10 short years, again primarily because of the soil situation. The third failure was the brainchild of American billionaire Daniel Ludwig. He believed the cold climate forests would not be able to meet the demand for paper from pulp, so he established a plantation of a rapid growing tree around a town called Jari, again in the Amazon basin.

Here is a quote from an article published in 2017 that breathlessly announces,

A study conducted by Brazilian and British researchers, published by Nature, showed that swamped areas in the Amazon rainforest produce between 15 and 20 million tons of methane every year – the equivalent of emissions by all oceans combined.

Did the IPCC extrapolate that data back to the 1750 level? Of course not! It, like the amount of CO2 from rotting vegetation under the Amazon rainforest, is just another vast unknown. The numbers used by the IPCC for CO2 from the oceans and rotting vegetation have an error factor that each alone exceeds the total human production. Despite that they claim that the annual increase in CO2 is, to use their terminology, very likely (90-100%) to account for the annual increase in atmospheric CO2 since 1950. This fits the Mauna Loa trend very nicely, but the measurements and instrumentation used there are patented and controlled by the Keeling family, first the father and now the son. These readings are the source of atmospheric CO levels used by the IPCC. The father was a fervid believer in human CO2 causing of warming, and the son is a member of the IPCC. Further, in a perverted twist to ensure false data quality control, the IPCC generate their own estimates of the annual production of human CO2.

If the oceans are the major source and sink of atmospheric CO2, then why doesn’t the warming El Nino events show up in the Mauna Loa record. A 2015 story about El Nino states,

El Niño has its fingers in a lot of pies this year: Not only is it helping to boost 2015 toward the warmest year on record but it is also a major factor in blockbuster hurricane activity in the Pacific and is contributing to a major worldwide coral die-off.

None of this proved correct.

Reportedly, a strong El Nino occurred in 1998 that pushed global temperatures to a high within the instrumental record. Why doesn’t it show on the Mauna Loa record when the seasonal variation of the vegetative cover appears quite strongly? (Figure 3)

Figure 3.

Notice the source of this figure is the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. It is also the place of employment of Mauna Loa patent owner Ralph Keeling and the promoter of AGW alarmism Naomi Oreske (Figure 4). Where is the reflection of CO2 increase due to the dramatic ocean warming and temperature increase caused by El Nino?

Figure 4: Keeling, Oreske, and Talley Photographed at Scripps after notification of Nobel Prize.

The entire AGW hypothesis is the biggest deception in history. It is no surprise that it is built on the biggest deception about actual data. The open and blatant representation of all the data in the IPCC Reports as real data is beyond shameful.

It is appropriate that the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report includes an obituary to Stephen Schneider. He began and attempted to justify the idea that dishonesty was necessary to promote the false story about AGW in a 1989 quote.

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So, we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.

The second last sentence is false, like the data used by the IPCC. What he really means is, if you study climate science you have to decide whether to be honest or dishonest. We know, from the unreal ‘data’ they present as real data, which one they chose.