By Paul Homewood
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the IPPR paper is little more than an incompetent attempt to spin dodgy data in support of a left wing political agenda.
As we now know, the BBC has now withdrawn claims in their original report last month, based on the above IPPR paper, that since 2005, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times, extreme temperature events by 20 times, and wildfires seven-fold.
The BBC has also added this update:
This does raise the intriguing question who blinked first, the BBC or IPPR.
But let’s see just how the IPPR have changed their report:
This is how the Summary compares:
BEFORE
AFTER
And in the detailed section, on P13:
BEFORE
AFTER
Despite the much greater elaboration in the new version, the difference between the two is quite stunning.
The original gave an almost cataclysmic account of how climate change was wrecking the environment. The new effectively states no more than these facts:
1) That summers are a bit hotter, (but unmentioned is that winters, springs and autumns are less cold, probably a good thing on balance)
2) Droughts are less pervasive in North America than they used to be.
Hardly apocalyptic!
There are, and will always be, regional variations in climate. But there is no evidence that the ones we have seen in recent decades have anything to do with global warming at all.
In short, the original paper claimed climate change as one of its main causes of “environmental breakdown”, the others being extinctions and topsoil loss.
That argument has now been destroyed.
Laughably they now describe the whole basis for their absurd extreme weather claims as “a quick survey”.
If they have really based a large chunk of their paper on a “quick survey”, it hardly inspires much confidence in the rest of it!
But maybe we ought to check one of their other main assertions, that 30% of the world’s arable land has become unproductive:
Strange that, because according to the UN’s own figures from FAOSTAT, the area harvested for crops has been at record highs lately:
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#compare
As for “unproductive”, the actual figures speak for themselves:
Hmm, the IPCC AR5 report seems to disagree:
‘Extreme Weather’:
Hurricanes – ‘ … low confidence that any reported long-term (centennial) increases in tropical cyclone activity are robust, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities. More recent assessments indicate that it is unlikely that annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have increased over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.’
&
‘In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low. There is also low confidence for a clear trend in storminess proxies over the last century due to inconsistencies between studies or lack of long-term data in some parts of the world (particularly in the SH). Likewise, confidence in trends in extreme winds is low, owing to quality and consistency issues with analysed data.’
Source: IPCC AR5 report (2013), Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis, Chapter 2, Pages 216-217, 2.6.3 Tropical Storms & 2.6.4 Extratropical Storms.
Drought – ‘In summary, the current assessment concludes that there is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century… ‘
Source: IPCC AR5 report (2013), Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis, Chapter 2, Pages 214, 2.6.2.3 Droughts.
Floods – ‘In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.’
Source: IPCC AR5 report (2013), Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis, Chapter 2, Pages 214, 2.6.2.2 Floods.
Sea Level Rise Acceleration:
‘The trend in GMSL [global mean sea level] observed since 1993, however, is not significantly larger than the estimate of 18-year trends in previous decades (e.g., 1920–1950).’
Source: IPCC AR5 report (2013), Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis, Chapter 3, Page 290, 3.7.4 Assessment of Evidence for Accelerations in Sea Level Rise.
Climate Models vs. 4 Observed Temperature Datasets:
Source: IPCC AR5 report (2013), Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis, Technical Summary, Page 87, Figure TS.14.
‘Hiatus’ in Warming From Approx. 1998:
Source: IPCC AR5 report (2013), Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis, Technical Summary, Page 61, Box TS.3 | Climate Models and the Hiatus in Global Mean Surface Warming of the Past 15 Years
Greenies – full of manure.
Skeptics’ climate science (not to be confused with the misleadingly-named website by that name) clearly needs an annual Lasker-type award for epic mainstream climate paper debunkings.
I suggest to call it the Feynman Medal, for the most significant contributions in a 12 month period of technical debunking of one or more mainstream, peer-reviewed climate science articles that initially received wide press coverage. (Technical debunking to be contrasted with a more general climate alarmism debunking that folks like Paul Homewood and Tony Heller perform. Such technical debunking requires application of skills in statistics and computer modeling to expose not obvious-to-the-layperson, bad peer-reviewed science papers).
If an award committee had to choose today, we’d have at least 3 serious contenders/nominees. The choice would be tough as there has been so much rich fertile climate paper manure being produced by the howling-mad lunatic asylum that is the Left environmental movement out there to be debunked. They’d have a tough choice to make.
Roy Spencer,
Nic Lewis,
Ross McKitrick.
BBCause
British Brainwashing Company
Sorry to keep beating a dead horse, but the following is ridiculous:
Average global surface temperature increases have accelerated, from an average of 0.007 C per year from 1900 – 1950 to 0.025 C from 1998 -2016 (Grantham 2018).
When are the real physicists and chemists and other who deal with real world measurements going to eat these people lunch for finding temperature increases out to the one-thousandths place when the temperatures were recorded in integer values, i.e. +/- 0.5 degrees.
Or for finding temperature changes out to the one-hundredth place when the temperatures were recorded at best to one decimal place, i.e. +/-0.05 degrees.
I would like to see what the referenced paper said the error component due to measurement precision was. These people act like they are unaware that they are dealing with real world measurements and not some problem in a text book with made up numbers. This doesn’t even deal with the error component of varying accuracies among different thermometers
I did anomaly calculation for the Phoenix Sky Harbor airport, because it has very good data over along period of time, with very little missing data. The months for the baseline average had over 99% of the available days in the period, and the months for the year for which I calculated the anomalies had every day in each month available.
My method was simple. I averaged every day in each month from 1981 to 2010. That means I took every January day, every February day, etc. and averaged them strictly according to the rules for propagating error and using significant digits in scientific measurements. I did the same with all of the months of 2015. All of the errors in the mean were calculated using ΔX / √N. These were the figures I ended up with:
2015 Avgs. Baseline Avgs Anomalies
Jan 14.8±0.6°C 13.6±0.1°C 1.2±0.6°C
Feb 18.7±0.3°C 15.5±0.1°C 3.2±0.4°C
Mar 22.4±0.7°C 18.5±0.1°C 3.9±0.7°C
Apr 23.5±0.5°C 22.7±0.1°C 0.8±0.5°C
May 26.0±0.7°C 27.9±0.1°C -1.9±0.7°C
Jun 34.5±0.6°C 32.7±0.1°C 1.8±0.6°C
Jul 34.8±0.3°C 34.9±0.1°C -0.1±0.3°C
Aug 35.9±0.4°C 34.3±0.1°C 1.6±0.4°C
Sep 32.2±0.3°C 31.4±0.1°C 0.8±0.3°C
Oct 26.4±0.6°C 24.9±0.1°C 1.5±0.6°C
Nov 16.7±0.7°C 17.9±0.1°C -1.2±0.7°C
Dec 12.3±0.6°C 13.1±0.1°C -0.8±0.6°C
If all the monthly anomalies are averaged, the result is 0.9±0.5°C.
I can’t imagine any climaticist ( we don’t call physicists “physics scientists”, or chemists “chemistry scientists”, do we?) accepting those numbers, even as a first approximation. Still, I’ve run them several times and ended up in the same place. It’s really a simple process for a single station.
Pick out a station with good data and very little holes. Average every day for each month over a 30-year period. That’s where you get the biggest help from the Law of Large Numbers/central theorem, because for that error in the mean , you take the standard deviation of the 30 year period and divide by the square root of 930 (31-day months), 900 (30-day months) or 846 (February, plus leap days). After that, not so much. The square root of days in a month or months in a year don’t get you much reduction in the error of the mean.
Even subtracting the baseline from the monthly average increases the uncertainty. When adding measurements, the uncertainty is calculated as √ ΔX^2 + ΔY^2. so having that big uncertainty on the month average makes an impact.
I don’t know what other magic the climatacists use to get their precision and uncertainty to such improbable levels when starting with measurements to the tenths place. I’d sure like to see it set out sometime.
BigT,
Nobody wants to believe the Sherrington hypothesis that CO2 has increased tooth size for those now aged 30 or under. Same way as CO2 greens the planet with extra growth. Geoff
“changes in many extreme weather and climate events have been observed, including a LIKELY increase in the frequency of heat waves over large parts of Europe, Asia and Australia”
If heat wave increases have been observed, why do they say it is a likely increase? Don’t the facts, evidence and observations speak for themselves?
Well, they would like it.
Indeed, either it’s been observed or it hasn’t been. If it’s “likely” that means it’s not been observed or the observations are so poor that they don’t say anything useful.
The BBC loves to quote “reports” issued by self-important members of the climate-industrial complex pretending to be important or relevant. They may just be envirotards like members of Greenpeace claiming to be “governmental advisors” or a bunch of corrupt MPs with financial interests in companies which benefit directly from government policies.
In reality, all these groups possess is just an opinion and a word processor. But that’s good enough for the BBC to give them airtime and free advertising for their political views.