This is a discussion thread for ideas and points related to the just released IPCC AR6 WGI report:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
Your thoughtful and detailed comments will be helpful in forming future stories on WUWT about the report.
Also, on Twitter, Dr. Roger Pielke Jr has a series of tweets, that is well worth your time to read.
Of course, there’s lots of gloom and doom headlines in the media, which is pretty much how they treat everything these days. For example, the ever-predictable Seth Borenstein with AP never fails to disappoint:
Seems Twitter has deleted Dr. Pielke’s posts.
Twitter needs to be deleted.
Anthony
I recommend a detailed look at the dishonest marketing of the Synthesis Figure in SPM.3
The synthesis figure highlights regions subject to drought and extreme precipitation.
Many regions show limited agreement or limited data. THIS IS BS.
Example. My region SAU – Southern Australia shows increased drought BUT no data to prove extreme precipitation. To prove drought or extreme rain, you use the same data. Thus they know there is no increase in extreme rainfall in SAU.
The same applies to North America.
The IPCC threw up the window sash, stuck out their arse, and let flee a fart. 😀
From the report summary I found this: “Equilibrium climate sensitivity. Paleoclimate data provide evidence to estimate equilibrium climate
sensitivity (ECS12 5 ) (TS.3.2.1). In AR6, refinements in paleo data for paleoclimate reference periods indicate
6 that ECS is very likely greater than 1.5°C and likely less than 4.5°C, which is largely consistent with other
7 lines of evidence and helps narrow the uncertainty range of the overall assessment of ECS. Some of the
8 CMIP6 climate models that have either high (> 5°C) or low (< 2°C) ECS also simulate past global surface
9 temperature changes outside the range of proxy-based reconstructions for the coldest and warmest reference
10 periods. Since AR5, independent lines of evidence, including proxy records from past warm periods and
11 glacial-interglacial cycles, indicate that sensitivity to forcing increases as temperature increases (TS.3.2.2).
12 {7.4.3.2, 7.5.3, 7.5.6, Table 7.11}"
For me the use of terms like "very likely", and "likely less", translates to that they really do not know. Instead of knowing what the actual climate sensitivity of CO2 is, they are still quoting a range of guesses. They are also categorically ignoring all the data and logic that indicates that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is actually less then the range they are quoting. For me the reasons seem to be all political. I believe that if the IPCC admitted that there was a possibility that the climate sensitivity of CO2 was actually less then 1.5 degrees C, they fear that their funding might be reduced. Apparently they still believe that H2O provides a positive feedback to any CO2 based warming even though adding more H2O to the atmosphere has an overall cooling effect as evidenced by the fact that the the wet lapse rate is significantly less than the dry lapse rate in the troposphere.
It’s all a bit cherry-picked.
OK. That makes sense when going from an icy world to one with lots of water vapour forming feedbacks.
But when the ice age is over the idea that warmer leads to more warming would obviously mean we live on Venus.
You have rightly spotted that this statement is nonsense.
“For me the use of terms like “very likely”, and “likely less”, translates to that they really do not know. Instead of knowing what the actual climate sensitivity of CO2 is, they are still quoting a range of guesses.”
Nothing has changed from last time. They are still trying to sell unsubstantiated speculation as established science.
I will read a bit of this report at a time. It’s huge. Part of its charm, and partly to justify its expense. I have a half-dozen other pressing issues at present, so looking at a made for purpose document won’t rise to very high priority, just now.
What was the date of AR5? It is difficult to imagine that there has been such an enormous change in weather events that we have crossed some detectable threshold during this time period. Hansen already played this hand way back in 1988. He said in Senate hearings of being 99% certain of man-made change, but this prompts one to ask, “even assuming his data are valid, how he arrived at the statistic, what distribution was he using?”
It turns out that if you read hansen’s more careful published statements at the time he does not repeat the 99% claim, but rather says that its difficult to assign attribution. My guess at this point is this summary point A.3 is the same sort of BS. Making different statements to different audiences hoping to balance impact against truth.
Even if one were to have observed a record high temperature in some heat wave in the time interval between AR5-AR6, or even an all time record, one is still hampered by the unknown variance connected to that observation and the barely constrained variance of the earlier period of recorded weather.
My input for the day FWIW.
At nearly 4000 pages, this could take a while. As usual, the SPM is crazily over-stated.
Well if you stick to a schedule and read a couple of pages per day, it will only take you until the next report comes out to finish it.
If I engaged an engineering consultant to provide a report on climate trends and they gave me this report, they would never get another job.
You would expect that after more than half a century of CO2 induced global warming there would be some clear evidence that it was occurring. Hence any current report should provide the trend, give a justifiable reason for it and then make some informed predictions on where it will go.
This report remains all speculation from model output. There is nothing concrete. In the detail, there is not an “each way” bet but an “every way” bet. Anything that is observed is due to CO2 induced global warming.
This is a mountain of poo that every politician should have as required reading to see how deep the poo really is. It is an indictment on science. The authors have clearly not created anything of value in their dismal careers.
Atmospheric water is a key indicator of increasing ocean surface temperature – that is even stated in the report. There is no chart yet showing a trend – just this ridiculous statement:
They are not even certain that there is a trend!!!. This is what is dished up as data.
Precipitation trends are even more fussy with errors greater than measurements and this BS:
CMIP3 mean shows an increase in precipitation to 2020 from 1980 of 5E-7kg/sq.m/s. That equates to 16mm/yr increase. This is the change was predicted:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/ipr_cmip3_ave_mean_sresa1b_0-360E_-90-90N_n_a.png
This is what has been measured:
If you selected the right starting point it may be possible to tease a trend out of that data but it would be BS.
If CO2 induced climate change was evident, it would not require a mountain of poo to make the point. I can show the whole basis of this charade is fundamentally flawed in a few paragraphs that is readily appreciated by anyone with the ability to think and easily verified.
More than a few paragraphs here but pictures as well:
http://www.bomwatch.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Bomwatch-Willoughby-Main-article-FINAL.pdf
The conclusion of Roger Pielke, Sr. speaks volumes. From his response on Climate etc. we have:
Comment on the AR6 Second Draft of IPCC Working Group 1 (WG1) report. February 2020
“IPCC Review Criteria from e-mail to me dated Feb 17, 2020″
“The SOD Expert Review is a formal component of the IPCC assessment process to provide a balanced and comprehensive assessment of the latest scientific findings. The IPCC Procedures state that the review process will be objective, open and transparent, with an open invitation for experts to register, seeking a range of views, expertise, and geographical representation.”
Dear sir/madam, I reviewed the first draft, at the encouragement of Professor Richard Betts. I thus submitted quite a few recommended edits/additions and noted significant omissions in my expert reviewer response to the first draft. In reviewing the latest draft, I am very disappointed that none of my comments were responded to in the report, nor even in any point-by-point response to my specific comments. It was wasted time for me to prepare my comments. I was hoping that this time the IPCC process would be inclusive and assess the diversity of perspectives by climate scientists. This is clearly not the case. The WG1 report, as currently drafted, will be seen by many in my community as a continuation of using the IPCC process as an advocacy for a particular view on the subject. With so much at stake, this, in my view, is an abrogation of what the IPCC was tasked to do in providing an objective peer reviewed-based assessment of the role of humans in the climate system and estimating resulting risks. The WG1 draft has failed with respect to this goal.
Sincerely, Roger A Pielke Sr
The IPCC is certainly not objective. Just the opposite. They are promoters of Human-caused Climate Change. They have a point of view.
If it is that critical and the UN is so worried about the end of civilisation as we know it then the UN Security Council should consider marching in and stopping the biggest CO2 emitter in their tracks. My bet: No action. Nothing to see here.
This link is a summary of the latest IPCC report.
https://youtu.be/ICE6l-5qTYE
The IPCC report needs one more chapter. The Economics and Costs to Implement their future forecasts or Scenario disasters.
I think those topics are addressed in WG3.
Climate models have no predictive value.
CMIP5, CMIP6, and CMIP6 again.
It’s climate models all the way down.
The whole field of consensus climatology is nothing but pseudo-science — a subjectivist narrative decorated with mathematics. 6AR is just more of the same. The unethical in collusion with the incompetent.
I reckon this pretty well sums it up (page TS16 – my bold)…”Although we have no evidence, we all agree that the past models are consistent with observation when we account for all the differences, so our new ones should too!”
There are gems like this throughout the 4000 pages.
limited evidence, high agreement
The definition of Group-think.
Definitely not the definition of real science.
No indeed.
A definition born of reality – as it has only been 8 years since the last one
Let me give you something that’s often overlooked in all this, the climate modelling racket.
The task of the IPCC is to summarize peer-reviewed papers (that support the view that there’s a big human influence on climate). Consider this ….
Any submitted paper that relies heavily on climate modelling will probably be reviewed by another climate modeller regardless of whether its the one (or more) that the authors of the paper suggest that journal engage.
The reviewing climate modeller has no easy way to check the modelling in the paper and to set up a model with the same inputs would take far too much time.
Further, the climate modeller reviewing the paper is more than likely on the same gravy-train as the paper because I’m sure there are very, very few jobs for climate modellers who don’t undertake work that supports the IPCC’s “opinions”.
All up the probability of getting a decent objective review of the paper with the modelling is very close to zero. Nonsense gets published because the review process fails, and then the IPCC gleefully cites the rubbish.
Cross Chapter box 9.1 (9-100, page 2250 on my PDF).
So, quick sum:
2018 – 1971 = 47 years.
146mm (worst case rise over that period).
146mm / 47 years = 3.11mm GMSL rise per year
So extrapolating over a century = 3.11mm x 100 = 310.6mm GMSL rise in 100 years.
Or about a foot. Yet yesterday the BBC was talking about 1 meter rise. They were out by a factor of 3.
Did the media get their units wrong? Or is there somewhere else (in the SPM maybe) where the IPCC gets their sums wrong?
Or does the IPCC assume some unknown, unidentified sudden source of acceleration?
There seems to be a lot of difference between the worst case observed sea level rise observations and the extrapolations.
Meta Comment: Has anyone found the index yet?
I didn’t see any reference to demurring papers and data, both of which are in plentiful supply. You could almost think that the bureaucrats who cobbled this report together feel their position is too brittle to withstand contrary opinions.
Hey ho, as always when the actual science reports come in, well after COP26, we will find that the situation is a lot more nuanced than “red flag” comments in the media would have you believe. As for the current mania of using wildfires as a metric for climate change just because fire=hot and so it can be filmed to portray man made CO2=hot, silly and contemptible.
SPM-40
This is important. It shows that detectable changes in radiative forcing are too small to effect climate responses at a global or regional level. They are swamped by natural variability.
Of course, one year is not enough… It will mount up.
But how can we attribute the cumulative effects of all the years if they are all swamped by natural variability. They could all be the natural variability. We have no evidence.
And also, this section acknowledges that the Covid lockdowns were nowhere near harsh enough to have any effect on CO2.
Policy Makers need to consider what that means for their policies.
It’s not just about the logical or scientific missteps or outright fraud – others are more well versed in these aspects than I. But what is the real underlying reason for this madness?
An excellent analysis for why all the “fear porn” and now coupled with plandemic lockdown nonsense – describes a mechanism to induce MASS PSYCHOSIS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09maaUaRT4M
MASS PSYCHOSIS – How an Entire Population Becomes MENTALLY ILL
So when you ask yourself why such and such or so and so can appear to be completely delusional, when you believe they are intelligent and have been rational in the past – the above video explains why this occurs, and has occurred on a mass scale.
TS.1.2.4 Understanding of Human Influence, TS-19 About Page 63.
Well that sounds sensible. Although measuring the heat in the ocean has far less history than measuring the air temperature.
The key issue here though is that all of the feedbacks that are meant to make AGW significant are related to the temperature in the air. Except possibly the albedo of polar ice (warmer water will melt ice, after all).
This new approach seems to undermine a lot of the assumptions that go into the models.
Not sure this a good point for discussing with policy makers but it seems to be important for understanding the climate research programme.
Except the surface energy budget isn’t known to better than about ±17 W/m^2, and the TOA budget is not known to better than about ±4 W/m^2 and the ocean heat uptake carries the implied claim that marine temperatures have a field-measurement accuracy of ±0.001 C.
So, it all sounds reasonable, except that they don’t actually know what they’re talking about.
Cross-Section Box TS.1: Global Surface Temperature Change TS-27 (page 70)
This is probably my most useless comment on this thread! But there seem to be two issues with this paragraph.
1) The idea that models are evidence. That seems to reify the hypothesis under investigation.
2) How can you have high confidence that they stay together within 10% but have low confidence in the sign of the difference? If it’s 10% below and goes to 10% above that’s a 20% swing.
This may read as a petty point but the actual temperature predictions are what this whole Global Warming thing is about.
Physical uncertainty in climate model air temperature projections is about ±15 C at a century out. That means the ignorance of the physically correct air temperature is that 30 C width., i.e., total ignorance.
For GMST, a lower limit of systematic measurement error is ±0.5 C.
All of that is peer-reviewed and published. But the IPCC and its minions are blind advocates and incompetent. Data for them is either confirmatory or an annoyance.
They ignore all disconfirmations and push on, and the money keeps flowing in.
Defund the IPCC to start a return to sanity.
Just dipping in and skipping through. Too much to do to review properly. But everywhere you look there’s a gem of imaginative science-ish stuff.
TS.2.4 The Ocean Page TS-40 Page 83.
So that’s medium confidence about what happened before we looked for it. No idea about what’s going on now (stated with high confidence) but… very likely there will be a decline in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.
These models can generate certainty without any need of real world observations of key processes. Clever stuff.
It appears that the climate alarmist @ur momisugly U.N. have taken up the role of yesteryears soothsayers. What magic they possess X6.
Box TS.6: Water Cycle (TS-50 page 93) is technically beyond me. But please can I flag it for review by someone more focused in this field.
It seems to tell stories of negative consequences everywhere. As though it assumes the climate is controlled by a sentient evil god. There will be more water in the atmosphere leading to more floods. And droughts too as the land warms faster than the sea. Not sure I followed why.
Still it warns us that “Large-scale deforestation likely decreases evapotranspiration and precipitation and increases runoff over the deforested regions relative to the regional effects of climate change (medium confidence). Urbanization increases local precipitation (medium confidence) and runoff intensity (high confidence)”. But that is only medium confidence.
It’s not clear to me how they assign their confidence levels.
We have high confidence that “Some tropical regions are also projected to experience enhanced aridity, including the Amazon basin and Central America (high confidence).”
So we cannot be as confident that rainforests stimulate rain as we can be that the Amazon basin will experience enhanced aridity.
This whole section is too advanced for me to comment on. Please can someone explain it to me?
TS.3.2.2 Earth System Feedbacks TS-59 Page 102
This is a confusing statement. It seems to say that photosynthesis is excluded from the modelling as we assume that CO2 keeps rising to get that doubling.
But imagine, for a moment, that we emit double the atmospheric CO2 in March and it’s all absorbed by grasses by the end of Summer (hypothetically). That would have a very different outcome to a world where “biogeochemical feedbacks that affect the atmospheric concentration of CO2 are not included”.
It’s confusing.
EDIT Extra from the next page.
Shame they didn’t include actually going out and measuring the temperature when a low level cloud comes over.
I was in Baja California during the July 1991 solar eclipse. I measured the air temperature during the 8 minute event. The temperature dropped about 1 deg F per minute.