By Andy May
The previous parts of this series investigated model bias in the CMIP6 models and in their interpretation in AR6 WGI. This part looks at model bias in AR6 WGII, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability.[1] The IPCC WGII report uses the possible future climate projections from the WGI report to project the future impact of climate change on society. It uses socio-economic models to accomplish this. As we saw in the previous parts of this series, the WGI report is biased and ignores possible natural contributions to recent observed global warming from changes in the Sun, cloud cover, and the meridional transport of energy.
The WGI/CMIP6 models, rather arbitrarily, assign all warming since 1750 to human influences, particularly CO2 emissions.[2] WGII accepts this controversial conclusion. It uses projected CO2 emissions combined with the WGI/CMIP6 models to predict future temperature and projected knock-on effects to other climate components, like precipitation, to model the future impact on human civilization.
WGII states that:
“Human-induced climate change, including more frequent and intense extreme events, has caused widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people, beyond natural climate variability.”[3]
AR6 WGII, page 9
This is only true if we accept their assumption about the range of natural climate variability, but as we saw in the previous parts of this series, their assumptions about natural warming, especially the impact of solar variability, are very controversial. Further, whether climate change is natural or human-caused, someone, somewhere, is nearly always going to be adversely affected by a change in climate, while others will benefit from the same change. How widespread is “widespread?”
WGII liberally discusses the potential negative impact of climate change,[4] and they discuss the potential benefits of their recommended adaptation and mitigation policies, but the report rarely mentions the well documented potential benefits of global warming and additional atmospheric CO2. [5] The fact that WGII only considers the problems of climate change and not the benefits, reveals their bias and invalidates their analysis. Even when mentioning a benefit, they find something negative in it. For example, they mention that elevated CO2 benefits woody plants, but that woody plants can cause an increase in atmospheric carbon.[6]
As Brian O’Neill writes, while many studies anticipate problems in the future, they also predict a future where humanity is better educated, better fed, longer lived, healthier, with less poverty, and less conflict. This is simply continuing a trend that has been underway for many decades.[7] O’Neill reports that currently there are 700-800 million people at risk of hunger globally. By 2050, even including the possible effects of 2°C of warming, that number will fall to 250 million.[8]
Currently the world’s economy is growing between 2 and 3% per year[9] and this is not expected to change much in the future. Looking ahead at a possible 2.5°C of warming in the next century or so, economists anticipate between a positive net climate change impact of about 2% and negative net impact of about 2.5% on global GDP. It is significant that the sign of the net economic impact due to climate change is not known. The average impact for 2.5°C of warming is a negative 1.3% for the average person.[10] In the next 80 years global GDP would be expected to grow between 487% and 1,000%, so a negative 1.3% due to climate change is unlikely to be noticed. Richard Tol writes that the uncertainty in the estimates of the impact of climate change on total economic welfare is very large and if we take this uncertainty into account, the impact of climate change does not significantly deviate from zero until 3.5°C of warming.[11]
Emissions and impact scenarios
The future cannot be predicted. So, the concept of “scenarios” was developed in the 1960s by Herman Kahn, a military strategist with the RAND Corporation.[12] The idea is to develop a “business as usual” forecast that assumes no unusual events occur over the planning period. Then you vary something and compute an alternative forecast that shows the difference between the baseline, business-as-usual, forecast and your model. It is just a learning tool and like all models, used to investigate the possible impact of policy changes, regulations, or tactical decisions in wars or battles. We are not supposed to believe any of the forecasts, it is just the relative values between various assumptions that are important. Scenario analysis is widely used to do cost-benefit analysis. However, since WGII only incorporates the costs and leaves out the benefits, their cost-benefit analysis is invalid.
It is very important to remember that the projections used in WGII assume that there will be no natural warming or cooling between now and 2100. If there are natural forces acting on climate, then the greenhouse gas-based projections they rely upon will be wrong and their projected impacts on human civilization must be wrong as well. The AR6 scenarios of temperature change relative to 1850 to 1900 are shown in figure 1.
Hausfather and Peters[13] have called the higher scenarios, SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5 (as well as their AR5 equivalent RCP8.5) unlikely, but since this view is contested,[14] AR6 WGII takes no position on which of the scenarios in figure 1 is most likely.[15] This is unfortunate since the difference in the scenarios in 2100, only 76 years from today, is over three degrees. The combination of the uncertainty in the projected warming and in the potential impact of the warming is extremely large.
Roger Pielke Jr. and Justin Ritchie tell us that the ancestor of the SSP5-8.5 scenario in figure 1 originated in the first IPCC report in 1990. In 1990, with what was known then, it was a reasonable “business-as-usual” scenario. It predicted a large increase in coal consumption and a CO2 concentration of 1,200 PPM in 2100. Today that emissions scenario is reached in SSP5-8.5, but with what we know today it is not “business-as-usual,” in fact it is an implausible future, that is becoming more impossible with each passing year.[16] To be fair, the IPCC does not call SSP5-8.5 business-as-usual, that label is used by others, presumably because that is what it is called in the first report in 1990.[17]
Marcel Crok reports in the book that he and I edited, The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC, that the unlikely, and now implausible, SSP5-8.5 and its predecessor RCP8.5 are mentioned in AR6 41.5% of the time according to Roger Pielke Jr., much more than the more likely SSP2-4.5 or RCP4.5 scenarios (mentioned 17% of the time). The latter two scenarios more closely match recent observations.[18] Thus, WGII often uses the biased and too hot WGI models as input to maximal and implausible emissions scenarios to do their modeled climate impact projections.
Ignoring the Good News
While using implausible scenarios and biased climate model results in assessing the impacts of climate change is unwise, ignoring the positive impacts of climate change and focusing only on the bad may well be worse. The whole idea of using scenarios is to investigate the full range of possible outcomes, not cherry-pick the model input to manufacture a desired outcome, a problem often called reporting bias. It is this part of the WGII procedure that cost them credibility.
Marcel Crok shows us that U.S. major and all landfalling hurricanes have been declining since 1900.[19] Globally, there is no trend in cyclones and hurricanes.[20] There is also no trend in accumulated global cyclone energy.[21] AR6 WGI finds that since 1950 there has been an increase in the number of hot days and heatwaves,[22] but as figure 1 in part 2 shows the world was cooling in 1950. At least in the United States, records show that peak hot days and heatwaves were in the 1930s.[23] AR6 WGI also finds that there is “low confidence in general statements to attribute changes in flood events to anthropogenic climate change.”[24] The idea that extreme weather is increasing globally is very controversial.
It is worth noting that AR6 WGII states that they have high confidence that some extreme weather is increasing as a result of climate change, including extreme rainfall events, more frequent and stronger cyclones/hurricanes, and that recent devastating floods were made more likely due to climate change.[25] This appears to be directly contradicted by what is stated in AR6 WGI, but WGII cleverly sidesteps the contradiction by specifying “Some extreme weather…” and “devastating floods in western Europe…” Thus, to make their point, they cherry pick locations and events and avoid discussing global impacts that have not changed or are decreasing.[26] In any given year, extreme weather events are increasing somewhere, that is the nature of weather. Their assertion is contradicted by the work of Zhongwei Yan, Philip Jones, and Anders Moberg already mentioned in part 5.[27]
Finally, both WGI and WGII completely ignore evidence that global warming and additional CO2 have many benefits. Bjorn Lomborg reports that human welfare will likely increase 450% in the 21st century and damages due to climate change might reduce this to 434%,[28] which will be hard for most people to detect. Lomborg also finds that non-climate-related deaths, due to earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, etc. have fallen only slightly in the past 100 years, but climate-related deaths have fallen a staggering 99%. Part of this is that cold-related deaths are much more common than heat-related deaths, and as the world warms, cold-related deaths fall more than heat-related deaths increase.[29]
Cherry picking
The authors of AR6 WGII were particularly guilty of selecting papers to discuss that supported their assumptions and ignoring papers that refuted or disagreed with them. In a classic case they discussed Grinsted, et al.,[30] which claims to be able to attribute some U.S. hurricane losses to human-caused global warming. Grinsted is the only paper, out of many[31] that was able to attribute hurricane losses to human-caused or human-enhanced hurricane activity. However, Roger Pielke Jr. has found that the paper is flawed and has requested that it be retracted.[32]
Even though the paper is likely flawed and is contradicted by many other studies, it is used to support the idea that some U.S. hurricane losses can be “partly attributed to anthropogenic climate change” in AR6 WGII.[33] To be fair, they do mention one of the many studies that disagree with Grinsted. However, they also mention one other paper, Estrada et al.,[34] that they imply supports attribution to human-caused climate change, but the paper does not say that. Estrada, et al. say that their results are ambiguous, and that in 2005 2-12% of normalized losses “could be attributable to climate change.” So, they chose one year, and only considered the United States, and maybe 2-12% of the damage was due to climate change. In Estrada’s conclusions they note:
“Increases in wealth and population alone cannot account for the observed trend in hurricane losses. The remaining trend in itself does not prove the existence of a climate change signal, as it could be due to causes not considered here.”
Estrada, Botzen, and Tol, Nature Geoscience, 2015
In other words, they detect a trend in normalized hurricane damage that cannot be fully explained by increasing wealth and population and it is possible that this excess is due to climate change. Estrada, et al. explain that prominent ocean oscillations, such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) can account for some of the excess hurricane damage observed. Also, data problems prior to 1940 could produce a spurious upward trend in damage. So, Estrada, et al.’s analysis uncovered a small excess trend in damage that might be explainable by climate change but could also be caused by other factors. Not very convincing.
AR6 WGII leaves the reader with the idea it is two against one, when actually one of the pro-attribution studies is inconclusive and they ignored a large number of studies that found no connection between hurricane damage and climate change. WGII does make the following statement, which partially absolves them:
“Climate change explains a portion of long-term increases in economic damages of hurricanes (limited evidence, low agreement).”[35]
IPCC AR6 WGII, page 1978
They are saved by the “limited evidence, low agreement” bit, but somehow that part is always left out of the press releases and news media.
WGII Model Bias, Summary
Just as WGI ignored the potential impact of solar variability and changes in meridional transport, WGII ignored the potential benefits of warming and additional atmospheric CO2. This invalidates the report. By ignoring the well-documented benefits of global warming and additional CO2, they clearly cannot assess the impact of climate change or our vulnerability to climate changes. It makes their report useless for policy making or cost-benefit analysis.
It is hard to decide exactly how to characterize this problem in AR6 WGII, it could be described as reporting bias, since they ignored so many studies that report warming and CO2 benefits. It could also be described as confirmation bias given their stated assumption that warming and additional CO2 is a bad thing. But, either way, they failed to honestly report the current state of the existing literature on the subject.
Next, we look at model bias in WGIII.
Download the bibliography here.
(IPCC, 2022) ↑
(IPCC, 2021, p. 67) ↑
(IPCC, 2022, p. 9) ↑
(IPCC, 2022, pp. 44-70) ↑
(May, Are fossil-fuel CO2 emissions good or bad?, 2022g), (Idso, 2013), (Zhu, Piao, & Myneni, 2016), (Tol R. S., 2018) , (Tol R. , Correction and Update: The Economic Effects of Climate Change, 2014b), and (O’Neill, 2023) ↑
(IPCC, 2022, p. 264) ↑
(O’Neill, 2023) ↑
(O’Neill, 2023) ↑
(International Monetary Fund, 2022) ↑
(Tol R. S., 2018) ↑
(Tol R. S., 2018) ↑
(Pielke & Ritchie, 2021) ↑
(Hausfather & Peters, 2020) ↑
(IPCC, 2022, p. 136) ↑
(Pielke & Ritchie, 2021) ↑
(Pielke & Ritchie, 2021) and (Hausfather & Peters, 2020) ↑
(IPCC, 1990, pp. 55-56) ↑
(Crok & May, 2023, pp. 122-126), (Hausfather & Peters, 2020), and (Pielke Jr, Burgess, & Ritchie, 2021) ↑
(Crok & May, 2023, p. 142) ↑
(Weinkle, Maue, & Pielke Jr., 2012) and see Dr. Maue’s site https://climatlas.com/tropical/ ↑
(Crok & May, 2023, p. 147), also see Dr. Maue’s site https://climatlas.com/tropical/ ↑
(IPCC, 2021, p. 82) ↑
(Crok & May, 2023, p. 146) ↑
(IPCC, 2021, p. 1569) ↑
(IPCC, 2022, p. 588) ↑
(Lomborg, Welfare in the 21st century: Increasing development, reducing inequality, the impact of climate change, and the cost of climate policies,, 2020), (Lomborg, We’re Safer From Climate Disasters Than Ever Before, 2021), and (Pielke Jr., 2021) ↑
(Yan, et al., 2001) ↑
(Lomborg, Welfare in the 21st century: Increasing development, reducing inequality, the impact of climate change, and the cost of climate policies,, 2020) ↑
(Dixon, et al., 2005) ↑
(Grinsted, Ditlevsen, & Christensen, 2019) ↑
For a list see: (Crok & May, 2023, p. 153) ↑
(Pielke Jr., Apples, Oranges, and Normalized Hurricane Damage, 2024) ↑
(IPCC, 2022, p. 1978) ↑
(Estrada, Botzen, & Tol, 2015) ↑
(IPCC, 2022, p. 1978) ↑
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Very good article
I don’t need any Ph.D. scientists to tell me that only 10 minutes of shoveling snow this winter in SE Michigan was very good news.
I had previously convinced the wife I should not use a snow shovel because it is a leading cause of male deaths in Michigan.
She likes to shovel for exercise. Complained she did not get enough exercise this winter and joined an L. A. Fitness club DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE. … . I get enough exercise jumping to conclusions.
The IPCC signals the climate narrative with +2.5 to +4.0 degrees C..
INM is not giving scary enough predictions — that’s what climate confuser games are for: To scare people. Not for accurate predictions — don’t make me laugh.
Climate gamers have had 50 years to revise programming to make climate predictions that at least appear to be more accurate, but they do not.
They are pressured to predict CAGW and given an acceptable range for the ECS of CO2
Science is much easier if you start with a conclusion
We do tend to forget the two books by Donna Laframboise exposing the corruption of the IPCC and particularly of the railway engineer chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri. Also let’s not forget the AR 6 frontispiece PAGES Hockey Stick which was cruelly disassembled by Steve McIntyre and shown to be using inadequate or inappropriate proxies some of which went DOWNWARDS. I’m told this hockey stick didn’t feature in the AR6 text so why?
Rhetorical question, but why give climate models the time of day when you know how utterly flawed they are? Sceptics would do better not to indulge them in the fantasy.
The public at large believe the new clerisy – now in every sphere of life from schools and universities through to the humble soap opera on TV – when they tell the public what the models are telling scientists is infinitely awful and that we must act – and er, now..
The models are wrong and will always be wrong based on current knowledge and understanding. This is what the public really needs to know. But officially, we know the models are absolutely bang on because….
“Human activities are causing world temperatures to rise, with more intense heatwaves and rising sea-levels among the consequences.
Things are likely to worsen in the coming decades….”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24021772
Sceptics, it seems to me, need the perfect antiGoebbels.
Without negative “impacts” the IPCC has no reason to exist. So they make them up.
Nonetheless, sceptics do not have to dance to piper’s tune
The propaganda machine is incredibly effective.
It certainly is
“So they make them up.”
Exactly right.
I don’t pretend to know what Skeptics ‘need’. The larger picture is that climate alarmism is just one aspect of an overall trend towards ‘collectivism’ in the West. I don’t see this trend reversing absent a marked reduction in living standards, and even that would probably be incorrectly attributed to what remains of (classical) liberalism. Weimar Germany was a mess, and its successor government was run by monsters.
Put it this way, Frank: the least needed is a level playing field at every level – especially the media
It’s entirely one sided
’The Commanding Heights’ was a huge bestseller at the turn of the century. Twenty years later and economic ‘central planning’ is ascendant. Certainly the ‘media’ is complicit in piling on, but they didn’t initiate the change.
What happens to humans once our work is all automated?
“why give climate models the time of day”
Better yet: Why assume CO2 is causing the climate to change?
Question: How does one know a climate is changing in a climate that changes continually? Answer: Climate history. Climate history tells us whether the climate is essentially the same as it was 100 years ago, or is radically different. Our current climate history tells us that the climate and weather are no more extreme with 425ppm of CO2 in the air than it was with 280ppm of CO2 in the air, 100 years ago.
Tom. You ask, “Why assume CO2 is causing the climate to change”? The answer was established in1988.The UN that year noted the “evidence” that anthropogenic gases were a problem.
The IPCC didn’t need to address that, their charter was quantify the extent and recommending solutions especially regarding sea lever rise. a major concern at the time among island nations.
The premise that CO2 was causing climate change was treated as fact in 1988. As we know The IPCC “solution” is ending fossil fuels and replacing them with unworkable wind and solar..
The IPCC charter established by the UN General Assembly:
6 December 1988
43/53 Protection of global climate for present and future generations of mankind
The General Assembly, …”Conservatism of climate as part of the common heritage of mankind.”
“Concerned that human activities could change global climate patterns, threatening present and future generations with potentially economic and social consequences”.
“Noting with concern that the emerging evidence indicates that continued growth in atmosphere concentrations of “greenhouse” gases could produce (sea level rise)”.
Yes, the IPCC started out assuming CO2 was a problem, even though there was, and is, no evidence that is the case.
Alarmist Climate Science is made up totally of speculation, assumptions and unsubstantiated assertions about CO2 and the Earth’s atmosphere, but the IPCC has managed to turn CO2-phobia into a money-maker even so.
Alarmist Climate Science has become the vehicle for the Western Elite Leftists to take the freedom of the People of the Western World away from them. It’s not about science anymore, it’s about money and political power
The above article links you to an article “What is Climate Change”. In this article they discuss the carbon isotopes one of which is the radioactive c-14. Using the c-14 decay rate and its current abundance they claim it came from very old plant matter.
Is this line of logic accepted?
Found my own answer. This exact discussion and graph came from a NOAA article at NOAA Climate.gov – https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/how-do-we-know-build-carbon-dioxide-atmosphere-caused-humans
Besides picking cherries, ignoring good news, model bias and scary scenarios, there’s just plain lie telling and changing historical data. Those activities by the IPCC, climate scientists and the media needs to be covered.
Not to mention intimidation of colleagues, blacklisting of skeptics and censorship by scientific organizations, mainstream and social media and governmental agencies.
Story tip: A matter of, well, judge for yourself
“”Shaun Spiers, executive director of the “independent” Green Alliance think tank, had a fawning interview on the Today programme this morning in which he attacked the government’s plans to prevent blackouts with new gas-fired power stations:
Guido is surprised to see Spiers spewing hot air in his passion for wind. In his previousposition at the Campaign to Protect Rural England he was quite stalwart in his campaigning against wind power:
Now the shoe is on the other foot and Spiers works at an eco-think tank. The BBC, naturally, chose not to mention Spiers’ former passionate activism. Neither did they think listeners would be interested to know he was previously an elected Labour MEP for London South East.”” When the wind blows against the Tories the BBC has always had a large roster of experts/activists to call on…
Guido Fawkes
https://order-order.com/2024/03/12/wind-fanatic-anti-government-think-tank-boss-used-to-campaign-against-wind/
Maybe he’s another one who’ll say anything if the salary is big enough.
Both WG-II and WG-III are open and honest about their contempt for the “science” (WG-I) part of their inputs.
From section 1.1.4 of the WG-II assessment report, “What is New in the History of Interdisciplinary Climate Change Assessment”, on page 131 :
That old fuddy-duddy “scientific literature” can be treated as a “historic” approach, and “we” — the All-Wise and Benevolent “experts” of the IPCC — can focus on the lofty pontifications of our (carefully selected) “associated scholars” instead …
… Translation : “Science ? We don’t need no steeeeeeeking science !”
_ _ _ _ _ _
People who question claims that the IPCC has “political” elements within it should read the following extract from section 1.4.1, “What is Equitable, Just and Effective Adaptation?”, on page 160, several times :
It took me a while to get past the fact that WG-II had pre-determined that their “goals” had to include “the concepts of equity and (social) justice”, and to notice their emphasis on the importance of how to articulate those “goals” to the general public, of just how much of “the (social) scientific literature” they were assessing related to the perceptions of the purported “risks” they, along with their media allies, relentlessly associate with future “climate change”.
DEI makes an entrance into the Climate Apocalypse.
Joyousness.
“Articulating the goals of adaptation at the international, national, and local levels thus requires engaging with the concepts of equity, justice, and effectiveness (high confidence).”
Starting soon “high confidence” ceases to mean something statistical and will be repurposed to mean something social. I didn’t love Ayn Rand, but the refrain “words have meanings” is important.
The unscientific cherry-picking by the IPCC of climate news and studies is just another example of the blatant bias we have come to expect from the politicized mainstream media and governmental agencies these days. One could hardly be faulted for suspecting that they are all on the same team.
It’s important to remember that the IPPC reports are created at the behest of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). An agreement made in 1992. That agreement included principles that guide the IPCC to this day.
These principles can be found here.
Of special interest is number 3:
In other words, negative impacts must be treated as real, even if the science does not support that. So long as we cannot categorically say that the science has definitely dismissed those negative impacts.
—Yet, the inverse assumption, that ‘positive impacts should be treated as real, even if the science does not support that’ is not demanded.
Therefore, the IPCC cannot be unbiased or accurate in it’s summarising of the science.
First it was global warming. That was not scary enough, so they added run-away greenhouse effect.
Still not enough alarmism, so they changed it to climate change. Then climate crisis. Then climate apocalypse with the latest addition of runaway global warming.
Humans definitely do affect the climate. There are now 8 billion people radiating heat and exhaling CO2. Every road changes the environment and affects climate. Every building. Every farm. The amount of energy needed for the people to live and prospers increases with the population. One factor not included is the amount of thermal energy induced into the climate due to energy production.
There is no denying climate change. There are serious questions of the magnitude and effects, which this article addresses in substance.
The UHI for windmills and solar farms has not been calculated. Those affect the climate.
Building a dam for hydro electric power generation affects the environment and the climate.
Climate is always changing. There can be no denial because it is based on the very definition of climate, which is a 30 year running average of weather in a region or locale. The weather 30 years ago is not identical to the weather today so that average changes, ergo climate change.
Since 1850? Based on what? There was no global temperature record using even the primitive instruments available back then. Mann’s calculations excluded over 2/3s of the planet, including the entire southern hemisphere. A few pine trees in California, one proxy from eastern Canada, and a few more from Siberia. Even if he hadn’t fudge the results, the results would still be bogus.
Now we are at the point of the
SpanishClimate Inquisition. If one does not accept every minutia of the climate religion, one is ostracized as a Climate Denier and subjected to punishment by the inquisition.Mann confirmed climate alarmism is political when his lawyer defined climate deniers equal to election deniers and Mann went on espousing the Marxist theory of silencing the opposition – control the language and control the ideas.
The worst of it is, in my job I do failure investigations amongst other things. The first step is the analysis of alternatives. The whole CO2 thing started in the mid-1970s when an official from the UN Environmental group stated (relative to impeding ice age) that they could not determine if CO2 was the cause BUT CO2 could be quantified and taxed. That was the trip (aka tipping) point. CO2 was blamed without any consideration of any other possibility.
I doubt I will live to 2050 and am more and more grateful of that fact with each passing day.
Sorry for the rant. I seem to be suffering from yet another time change
In addition to pointing out the flawed arguments for worsening storms from global warming in this article, Mr. May’s prior article here “Climate Model Bias 5: Storminess” emphasized the decrease in storms since the Little Ice Age. He pointed out that storms cool the earth as part of the meridional transport of energy away from the tropics.
If they are correct that storms are worsening and are intellectually honest, the “experts” are caught in a conundrum. Do they hype the negative impact of storms that the public sees in the news or admit in their scientific papers that increased storms cool the climate?
The cost that Bloomberg’s green energy research team estimates to stop warming by 2050 is $US200 trillion.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-07-05/-200-trillion-is-needed-to-stop-global-warming-that-s-a-bargain#xj4y7vzkg
There are about 2 billion households in the world with 90 percent of them unable to afford anything extra.
That leaves about 200 million households to share the $US200 trillion cost or about $US1 million per household.
Almost all households would rather have $US1 million in the bank and a degree or two of warming than not having the money and it staying the same temperature.
Do you work for Bloomberg? This has to be the 100th posting of that link here.
When Bloomberg sells up everything he owns, and spends it all on “renewables” around the world, expecting no subsidies or income…
Then I “might” take some notice of his comments…
Until I can see he is prepared to bet everything, for nothing, he is nothing but a rancid low-life hypocrite !
According to the World Meteorological Organization “climate” is just 30 years now, instead of the thousands to millions of years climate used to be, so the “climate” is always changing, it’s just long-term weather now.
I guess that’s all the models could hope to forecast and they can’t even do that.
The models ignore the Sun, the main source of the Earth’s heat, the clouds which are the main reflector of the Sun’s heat back into space, and the oceans which are the main reservoirs of heat.
They usurped the micro climate definition because it works better to their narrative.
1850 is a strange starting point.
But then again, in 2007 a team of Norwegian scientists did chemical analyses of ice cores and documented CO2 levels back to the early days of the 1700s. Funny how the curve shows those earlier years had CO2 levels as high (or higher) than today.
Using 1850 also eliminates questions of how much the temperature had risen during the previous 150 years, which would have made modern warming seem insignificant.
The current IPCC charter is built on the false premise that human activities, specifically creating greenhouse gases “threatening present and future generations with potentially economic and social consequences.”
Fair and balanced reporting on the climate such as cost/benefit analysis is currently verboten, outside the UN IPCC charter.
Copy/past abbreviated:
The IPCC charter established by the UN General Assembly:
6 December 1988
43/53 Protection of global climate for present and future generations of mankind
The General Assembly, …”Conservatism of climate as part of the common heritage of mankind.”
“Concerned that human activities could change global climate patterns, threatening present and future generations with potentially economic and social consequences”.
“Noting with concern that the emerging evidence indicates that continued growth in atmosphere concentrations of “greenhouse” gases could produce (sea level rise)”.
Summary: WG2 erroneously sees all cost and no benefit to AGW.
The real IPCC problem is that their recommended solutions are truly all cost and no benefit.
But, very profitable for green billionaires.
Rud. Agree, that’s why I stated, “Fair and balanced reporting on the climate such as cost/benefit analysis is currently verboten, outside the UN IPCC charter”.
Worshippers of the hockey stick are making the claim that warmer temperatures makes trees grow faster.
Why do they then insist that heat is bad for all other plants?
As far as I know, all dynamic systems have an optimal operating range. It seems that alarmists assume that all dynamic systems are open ended and don’t have an optimal operating point or range other than the near-term historical values. They assume, with no facts in evidence, that climate had miraculously been at a base plateau and any change upward results in a degradation of the system. Downward changes are ignored as improbable and not worth discussing.
“optimal” is a word that requires other words to have meaning. What are you/they optimizing?
[QUOTE FROM ARTICLE]”For example, they mention that elevated CO2 benefits woody plants, but that woody plants can cause an increase in atmospheric carbon.”[END QUOTE]
Since woody plants, like all other green plants, remove CO2 from the atmosphere by photosynthesis, how would that cause an increase in atmospheric carbon?
[QUOTE FROM ARTICLE]”Bjorn Lomborg reports that human welfare will likely increase 450% in the 21st century and damages due to climate change might reduce this to 434%,[28] which will be hard for most people to detect.”[END QUOTE]
If everyone tried to reach “net zero” by relying on solar panels and windmills, the lack of useful energy would have a catastrophic effect on human welfare and GDP, probably around -80%. People who are young adults now, by 2050 will probably yearn for the “good old days” of plentiful energy and well-stocked grocery stores, and rebel against those restricting energy production, and not worry about a fraction of a degree of warming.
[QUOTE FROM ARTICLE]”It predicted a large increase in coal consumption and a CO2 concentration of 1,200 PPM in 2100.”[END QUOTE]
The CO2 concentration at Mauna Loa is about 420 ppm, and rising at about 2.5 ppm/yr. At that rate, the CO2 concentration would rise an additional 190 ppm over 76 years until 2100, reaching a total of about 610 ppm. In order to reach 1200 ppm by the year 2100, the CO2 accumulation rate would have to accelerate to 10.25 ppm/yr on average, or over 4 times the current rise rate.
Man-made CO2 emissions were about 36.8 Gt/yr in 2022. A mass balance over the atmosphere shows that, if there were no natural sinks, 8 Gt of emissions corresponds to 1 ppm, so that the 2022 emissions would have increased the CO2 concentration by 4.6 ppm. Since the actual rise rate is only 2.5 ppm/yr, nature is removing a net 2.1 ppm/year, or 16.8 Gt/yr from the atmosphere.
In order to provoke a rise rate of 10.25 ppm/yr, human CO2 emissions would have to increase to 8 * 10.25 + 16.8 = 98.8 Gt/yr on average over the next 76 years, or 2.68 times the current (2022) emission rate. This also assumes that the natural CO2 removal rate remains constant, but since photosynthesis speeds up with increasing CO2 concentrations, the natural removal rate will be higher at future (higher) CO2 concentrations. A forecast of 1200 ppm by the year 2100 strains credulity from the point of view of a mass balance.
The graph in Figure 1 seems to show that the SSP3-7.0 scenario would provoke a temperature increase of 3.9 C by 2100 relative to the zero point of the graph, and about 2.8 C after 2020. However, an IR radiation balance shows an equilibrium climate sensitivity of about 1.5 C per doubling of CO2 concentration on land, and less over the ocean.
But if the CO2 concentration in 2100 is actually about 610 ppm (following a current linear trend), assuming a logarithmic dependence of temperature rise on CO2 concentration, this represents about ln (610/420) / ln(2) = 0.54 doublings. Assuming a sensitivity of 1.5 C per doubling, and no changes in natural effects, the anticipated temperature rise through 2100 would be 1.5*0.54 =0.81 C
Our great-grandchildren won’t have much to worry about climate change.
Lots of quotes attributed to Bjorn Lomborg. Good for him, building brand recognition.
Very good Andy, you are doing important work.
We need to find a way to communicate this information to the common guy. If he didn’t learn anything other than what you have said here all of this lying and cheating crap would go away. The common guy doesn’t like being screwed he doesn’t care who is doing the screwing.
On the likelihood of 8.5 Schwalm used by WG2 to justify its use relies on the suggestion it is cumulative emissions that drive temp and up to 2050 8.5 is as good as any when compared with IEA prognostications. Only after that does it come unstuck. Problem is of course that its only after 2050 we see the continued increase in temps in 8.5 while the rest level out, and this emerging divergence can be seen in the cumulative emissions too.
I note too WG2 argues that you might get 8.5 temps even on 4.5 emissions. Of course you might but at low probability, and if you use the model runs using 4.5 to give a rough probability distribution you find temps higher than the mid point of 8.5 are unlikely.
This statement came from: “The CO2 released from burning fossil fuels has a distinctive chemical fingerprint which matches the type increasingly found in the atmosphere” comes from the BBC article “What is Climate Change” linked by the Strativarious comment below.
Is it true that you can tell the source of CO2? The logic is that because carbon C-14 is radioactive they have measured the decay rate and determined that C-14 comes from very old plant material.
Is this true?
“The future cannot be predicted.”
Yes it can, particularly the big heatwaves which they believe will become more frequent and intense. The UK Met Office think that we made our 2003 and 2018 heatwaves 10-30 times more likely, and that hotter and longer major heatwaves will occur every other year by 2050.
Such heatwaves never occur without their discrete solar forcing. 2003 and 2018 were the same type as in 1934, 1949, and 1976, and the next of that type is in 2045. The next 1936 and 2006 type is in 2116.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQemMt_PNwwBKNOS7GSP7gbWDmcDBJ80UJzkqDIQ75_Sctjn89VoM5MIYHQWHkpn88cMQXkKjXznM-u/pub