by Judith Curry
Clintel has published a new report entitled “The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC: Analysis of the AR6.”
“The new Report provides an independent assessment of the most important parts of AR6. We document biases and errors in almost every chapter we reviewed. In some cases, of course, one can quibble endlessly about our criticism and how relevant it is for the overall ‘climate narrative’ of the IPCC. In some cases, though, we document such blatant cherry picking by the IPCC, that even ardent supporters of the IPCC should feel embarrassed.”
Climate Intelligence (CLINTEL) is an independent foundation that operates in the fields of climate change and climate policy. CLINTEL was founded in 2019 by emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and science journalist Marcel Crok.
The CLINTEL Report is edited by Marcel Crok and Andy May, with contributions from Javier Vinos, Ross McKitrick, Ole Humlum, Nicola Scafetta, and Fritz Vahrenholt.
The Chapter topics are:
- No confidence that the present is warmer than the mid-Holocene
- The resurrection of the Hockey Stick
- Measuring global surface temperature
- Controversial Snow Trends
- Accelerated sea level rise: not so fast
- Why does the IPCC downplay the Sun?
- Misty climate sensitivity
- AR6: more confidence that models are unreliable
- Extreme scenarios
- A miraculous sea level jump in 2020
- Hiding the good news on hurricanes and floods
- Extreme views on disasters
- Say goodbye to climate hell, welcome climate heaven
The key issue is this: the IPCC focuses on “dangerous anthropogenic climate change,” which leads to ignoring natural climate change, focusing on extreme emissions scenarios, and cherry picking the time periods and the literature to make climate change appear “dangerous.”
“The IPCC ignored crucial peer-reviewed literature showing that normalised disaster losses have decreased since 1990 and that human mortality due to extreme weather has decreased by more than 95% since 1920. The IPCC, by cherry picking from the literature, drew the opposite conclusions, claiming increases in damage and mortality due to anthropogenic climate change.”
With regards to IPCC AR6’s error ridden assessment of extreme weather events, see also this analysis by Roger Pielke Jr that demonstrated egregious errors in incorrectly reporting the conclusions from papers that were actually cited by the IPCC.
With regards to ignoring natural climate variability, Chapters 1 (mid-Holocene), 2 (Hockey Stick) and 6 (the sun) are excellent.
I’ve looked at the AR6 WGI Report fairly thoroughly, focusing mainly on specific material that was relevant for my new book Climate Uncertainty and Risk. I am familiar with nearly all of the issues raised in the CLINTEL Report, but the material in Chapters 2 (Hockey Stick) and 4 (snow trends) was new to me. The next section focuses on the Hockey Stick.
Zombie Hockey Stick
Shortly after publication of AR6 WGI, I spotted some comments in twitter regarding the resurrection of the Hockey Stick. After wondering “what fresh new Hockey Stick hell is this?”, I didn’t investigate further.
Well the Clintel Report did the work for me. Subtitle for Chapter 2:
“A big surprise in the new IPCC report is the publication of a brand new hockey stick. The IPCC once again has to cherry pick and massage proxy data in order to fabricate it. Studies that show larger natural climate variations are ignored.”
Excerpts from the Chapter:
The PAGES 2k group is specialised in climate reconstructions and back in 2013 was comprised of the majority of all active paleoclimatologists. The PAGES 2k Consortium (2013) published a reconstruction in which parts of the first millennium were occasionally as warm as present-day
In 2019, PAGES 2k published a new version of the temperature development of the past 2000 years (PAGES 2k Consortium, 2019)11. Surprisingly, it differed greatly from the predecessor version. Even though the database had only mildly changed, the pre-industrial part was now suddenly nearly flat again. The hockey stick was reborn.
The new hockey stick was immediately incorporated into the AR6 report (IPCC, 2021). Among the lead authors of AR6 chapter 2 is Darrell S. Kaufman who is a co-author of the new hockey stick in the PAGES 2k Consortium (2019). This is probably not a coincidence.
Evidence suggests that a significant part of the original PAGES 2k researchers could not technically support the new hockey stick and seem to have left the group in dispute. Meanwhile, the dropouts published a competing temperature curve with significant pre-industrial temperature variability (Büntgen et al., 2020). On the basis of thoroughly verified tree rings, the specialists were able to prove that summer temperatures had already reached today’s levels several times in the pre-industrial past. However, the work of Ulf Büntgen and colleagues was not included in the IPCC report, although it was published well before the editorial deadline.
Like its predecessor, the new hockey stick by PAGES 2k 2019 is based on a large variety of proxy types and includes a large number of poorly documented tree ring data. In many cases, the tree rings‘ temperature sensitivity is uncertain. For example, both PAGES 2k Consortium (2013) and PAGES 2k Consortium (2019) used tree ring series from the French Maritime Alps, even though tree ring specialists had previously cautioned that they are too complex to be used as overall temperature proxies.
In contrast, Büntgen et al. (2020) were more selective, relied on one type of proxy (in this case tree rings) and validated every tree ring data set individually. Their temperature composite for the extra-tropical northern hemisphere differs greatly from the studies that use bulk tree ring input.
In some cases, PAGES 2k composites have erroneously included proxies that later turned out to reflect hydroclimate and not temperature. In other cases, outlier studies have been selected in which the proxies exhibit an anomalous evolution that cannot be reproduced in neighbouring sites (e.g. MWP data from Pyrenees and Alboran Sea in PA13). Outliers can have several reasons, e.g. a different local development, invalid or unstable temperature proxies, or sample contamination.
Steve McIntyre has studied the PAGES 2k proxy data base in great detail and summarized his criticism in a series of blog posts on his website Climate Audit. For example, the PAGES 2k Consortium (2019) integrated a tree ring chronology from northern Pakistan near Gilgit (“Asia_207”) which shows an extreme closing uptick. Incorporation of data series like this strongly promote the hockey stick geometry of the resulting temperature composite. McIntyre analysed the original tree ring data and found that the steep uptick in the Asia_207 chronology is the result of questionable data processing. When calculating the site chronology using the rcs function from Andy Bunn’s dplR package, the uptick surprisingly disappears. In fact, the series declines over the 20th century.
Conclusion: The resurrected hockey stick of AR6 shows how vulnerable the IPCC process is to scientific bias. Cherry picking, misuse of the peer review process, lack of transparency, and likely political interference have led to a gross misrepresentation of the pre-industrial temperature evolution.
https://clintel.org/thorough-analysis-by-clintel-shows-serious-errors-in-latest-ipcc-report/
JC reflections
The CLINTEL Report provides a much needed critical evaluation and intellectual counterpoint to the IPCC AR6.
There is a lot of good material in the AR6 WG1 Report, but there is also a lot of cherry picking and flat out errors in the Report (the AR6 WG2 Report is just flat out bad). With any kind of serious review, or if the author teams have been sufficiently diverse, we would not see so many of these kinds of errors. Unfortunately, the IPCC defines “diversity” in terms of gender, race and developed versus underdeveloped countries; actual diversity of thought and perspective is dismissed in favor of promoting the politically mandated narrative from the UN.
The consensus disease that that was caught by the IPCC following publication of the First Assessment Report in 1990, combined with pressures from policy makers, is resulting in documents that don’t reflect the broad disagreement and uncertainties on these complex topics. The IPCC’s mandated narrative has become very stale. Worse yet, it is becoming increasingly irrelevant to policy making by continuing to focus on extreme emissions scenarios and the embarrassing cherry picking that is required to support the “climate crisis” narrative that is so beloved by UN officials.
In any event, UN-driven climate policy has moved well past any moorings in climate science, even the relatively alarming version reported by the IPCC. The insane policies and deadlines tied to greenhouse gas emissions are simply at odds with the reality of our understanding of climate change and the uncertainties, and with broader considerations of human well being.
The IPCC reports are rather like “expert witnesses” used by liability lawyers, exhibits intended to serve a narrative.
The IPCC has had no resemblance to “science” since the early 1990’s.
C’mon you always need a bit of ritualistic warmup and conspicuous virtue signalling before getting down to the nitty gritty of establishing the facts of the matter-
Group of ‘entitled politicians’ attend an expensive ‘smoking ceremony’ (msn.com)
It’s important to always display empathy for one’s topic of inquiry and remember some smoke with CO2 is more equal than others.
Are you arguing that the IPCC had a resemblance to science prior to the early 1990’s?
The first report made some effort to hide the preestablished conclusions. They actually admitted that the Little Ice Age was real, for example.
Not sure that’s an appropriate analogy. Expert witnesses have obligations to the court even though they are being paid to represent one side or the other in a dispute. The legal team undoubtedly will try to put their spin on what the expert witness has to say but ultimately the expert witness must stand by their testimony.
Do you remember “recovered memory”? Or the witnesses in the glyphosate liability cases? Or silicone breast implants? Judges are fairly bad at knowing any science, so California’s Prop 65 is still considered valid law, rather than Cargo Cult Science.
Former presidential candidate John Edwards won a large number of malpractice cases on a highly dubious claim that cerebral palsy was caused by birth trauma, that is, the OB did not do a C-section fast enough. Judges let his “experts” make that claim, although it is still not proven.
“In many cases, the tree rings‘ temperature sensitivity is uncertain….
In some cases, PAGES 2k composites have erroneously included proxies that later turned out to reflect hydroclimate and not temperature…”
____________________________________________________
Shouldn’t increases in CO2 also be included in that?
Proxies from around the globe show not only the Holocene Climate Optimum, but the Egyptian, Minoan, Roman and Medieval Warm Periods were balmier than today. So were most if not all previous interglacials of at least the past 800,000 years. For that matter, virtually the whole Mesozoic Era and most of our present Cenozoic.
The Owners of the MONETARY SYSTEM and their friends the Billionaires (from around the Planet!) will keep on doing what they want in order to reach their goals of Securing a Planet with less heads of modern moron slaves!
The herds just keep on grazing…
How does the IPCC AR6 handle items like this:
https://www.icelandreview.com/news/3000-year-old-trees-excavated-under-glacier/
fake stumps put there by climate deniers? /sarc
The trees crawled under the glaciers just like the humans they find under them did.
Aloadof Rubbish Volume 6
There are striking parallels between climate alarmism and covid alarmism.
When covid alarmists were insisting we all be vaccinated, there was the promise that those who were vaccinated would not spread covid.
They also denied that there was natural immunity that would protect many people.
With climate alarmists we have been promised that net zero will prevent the increase of the world average temperature – whatever that means.
They also deny that there are mechanisms in nature to prevent the world from burning up.
The common objective being to spin a crisis (real or imaginary) to exercise ever-greater control over people.
Deliberately ignoring any data that goes against the conclusion you are trying to support is not an “error”, it is out and out deception.
Creating/tolerating and using clearly preposterous reports like Michael Mann’s MBH98 hockey stick are worse. That is going from special pleading to outright lying.
The IPCC is clearly just practicing the principles of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. They dare not reject the ideas and publications of any members, no matter how silly or poorly researched for fear of hurting someone’s feelings. All interested parties must be included and respected unless, of course, such ideas could be perceived as critical of another members submissions. After all only racist, misogynist, capitalist pigs would deny that really big expensive computers are able to predict the future when programed by people with PhDs.
But… will the ardent supporters even know about such blatant cherry picking, since I doubt they read this site, with few exceptions? Let’s see what those few have to say about it. 🙂
tree rings are not thermometers and shouldn’t be used by EITHER side
I was under the assumption that dendrochronology of certain species,
such as the temperate redwoods & sequoia gave a good amount of information about
past climate conditions esp when crossed with other proxy’s such as sediment
layers. Then compared with the dendro of the high elevation bristlecone pine. The
two show both moisture and temperature I thought.
I also saw a study from 10yrs ago of a white pine stump/trunk that was found after the melting of high altitude snow in the Granite Peaks area. It was carbon dated to 1000 yrs old and was found 500ft above the present day tree line..also found nearby was a pishkun aka
buffalo jump @ 10,500 ft in elevation with 175,000 stone artifacts….curious to me
at least.
Tree rings will give an assessment of the quality of the growing season. However there are dozens of things that make a good growing season. Temperature is only one of those. Also, too little heat is as bad as too much heat.
Even if everything was held constant, there would be no way to tell if shrinking growth rings was caused by temperatures dropping below optimum or climbing above it.
Finally, tree rings tell absolutely nothing about times when trees are dormant. Regardless of whether winters were getting warmer or colder, it would have no impact on growth rings.
I was led to believe that the dendro in say the Sequoia’s which
have fire rings from wild fires would show drought. Also
that when coupled with other paleo studies such as
sediment layers from the same area which show fire ash might
be an indication of climate. I read somewhere that the Sequoia’s
show something like a 400 yr long drought..maybe I misunderstood.
The other example of a large white pine tree 500 ft above the present
day tree line might suggest a warmer period..with that coupled
with the fact that it was preserved by being covered with snow
and ice for 1000yrs. And the presence of
a very large buffalo jump at over 10K ft in elevation that was
used for a long period is very curious as the buffalo were plains
animals, not mountain goats.. Why would they be at such an elevation? And the fact that the Natives were able to live
up there basically half naked is also curious. I’ve been at
those heights and found the conditions severe.
Mr Ed writes “temperate redwoods & sequoia gave a good amount of information about past climate conditions esp when crossed with other proxy’s such as sediment layers”
….
How do you work out if your results are giving you a more or less correct answer, or even the right answer?
You have partly answered by noting correlation with other methods. Have you ever seen the raw data of (say) a study comparing tree rings to sediment layers? So much of what you read as conclusions is difficult to extract any answers from, let alone the “right” ones and as literature shows, it is commonly tainted with deceptions as for example the work of Stephen McIntyre shows.
Treat yourseld to a read of this 2021 Climate Audit essay, where Steve shows how a hockey stick is created out of the ether by PAGES 2K authors.
https://climateaudit.org/2021/09/15/pages-2019-0-30n-proxies/
The PAGES 2K authors have taken tree ring records from a number of places and times and combined them to create a classic hockey stick. This has overcome the problem that that vast majority of the input records have no hockey stick of their own. Their hockey stick is a product of their selected methods, not of Nature.
PAGES2K is a disgrace to Science.It is just one of many climate groups who lack rigour in favour of belief.
Geoff S
My level of expertise is at best a ‘layman’s level”. After following the
popular ‘climate change’ rhetoric I decided to study the subject
about 10 yrs ago after getting busted up in a ranch accident.
The only tool I had was an internet connection. I purchased a kindle and began downloading books on the subject. I still have the kindle somewhere but I abandoned it due to the inability to bookmark on it.
I read constantly for about a month or so till I healed up and went back
to work. I concluded that the popular line was totally false and have
continued to study as much as possible. This was around the time
of the climategate email deal. I found the subject of paleo-climate
the most interesting along with the book The Neglected Sun.
My real work for the past 30 yrs has been focused on range management
on a production level but have gotten to know a few of the top
professionals in the field who have been very helpful over the years.
Much different than the climate science arena The Ag work is how I became interested. in meteorology. I should have gone to collage but I’ve been told
that my experience in the military during Vietnam changed me..life
can take one down some interesting paths…if you let it..
If you’ve been here long enough, you might recall about (eight?) years ago, there was a young lady (gender assumed) named “Kristi” (possibly ‘Kristi Silber’, but I’m really fuzzy on that last name, so please don’t hold imperfect memory against me … ), who claimed expertise in Botany.
At one point in an exchange, I asked her point-blank, “Are tree rings useful for establishing environmental temperature data?”, or some paraphrase to that effect. Her answer was direct.
“No.”
That’s all she wrote. I have since consulted some botany instructors at our local community college, and asked, in various forms and formats, if tree growth/tree rings is/are a function of temperature. Each disavowed that tree rings are a useful way to establish what an ancient temperature was, the reason being that tree growth is affected by much more than just the temperature of the environment.
There is a possible way to establish some form of ‘calibration’, as it were, but it would require, at a minimum, over a century in temporal terms, multiple biomes, meticulous record keeping, and researchers who were dedicated to virtually little else. In other words, just not feasible. M & M have already established that Mikey Mann’s infamous ‘hokey schitk’ was just a fabrication of the Yamal tree (it showed what they wanted to see, so it received an inordinate weighting in the computer program), so if the IPCC is falling back on discredited methodology, then the fault is theirs, in toto.
Regards to all,
Vlad
Yes, everybody concedes that chicken entrails are just as reliable for paleo temps reconstructions as tree rings.
Messier though, and you don’t want to leave them outside in the sun for too long before you analyse them.
Most people simply are not paying close enough attention to any of these issues as many here have pointed out. And censorship and media bias knocks out those that are curious before they discover there are alternative narratives.
We have just experienced one of the worst cases of centralized control mismanaging a crisis , specifically the WHO and vast government heath bureaucracy Covid response.around the world. The unnecessary death toll is truly a holocaust. Yet most people haven’t a clue. I am not optimistic.
Do read the sainted Steve McIntyre’s climateaudit.org for his devastating analysis of the fraudulent PAGES Hockeystick which appears as a frontispiece but does not appear in the report. How can anyone have the slightest respect for the IPCC?
Considering that all of the IPCC work is done with tax payer money the IPCC is obligated to be transparent and truthful to tax payers. They haven’t been either. We need to make them defend their work publicly. They should pick the best that they have and we will offer a pool of skeptics. They can choose anyone in the pool to debate, the skeptics they choose may or may not be our best, it doesn’t matter. I think we could clean their clock no matter who they choose. They are liars and cheats, what science they have is half baked and can’t stand the light of day. They are accustomed to preaching to the choir, they have never been properly challenged.
Story tip.
It is too terrible, the global warming. We have record cold in Antarctica.
https://exxpress.at/minus-75-grad-rekord-kaelte-in-der-antarktis/
Consensus is used as an excuse to prevent debate. It has no other purpose. Recall the consensus of Eugenics, Lysenkoism, the Domino theory, Iraq having “weapons of mass destruction” and more recently the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation and the “Covid vaccine will protect you”. All were the product of consensus.
They have consensus is Russia- if you don’t agree, you’ll fall out of a window or get to enjoy the spring in Ukraine. My definition of consensus is “mob rule”.
If the IPCC is serious about the need for action to significantly reduce CO2 because of “fossil fuels” they simply need to go all in for nuclear. Otherwise, the appropriate response is to defund The IPCC because it is a conspicuous hoax.
“story tip” The NY Post seems quite receptive of things that run counter to the popular narrative. It has good distribution https://nypost.com/ I wonder if we couldn’t get some this published there?