The IPCC is Promoting a Left-Wing Political Agenda Masquerading as ‘Science’ (by Chris Morrison)

 

The political role played by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in fomenting climate and ecological panic to push through a collectivist Net Zero project is starting to attract general and widespread sceptical debate. In recent years, every IPCC climate utterance has sought to ramp up alarm and push the unproven hypothesis that humans are causing the climate to heat up by burning fossil fuel. The recently published Synthesis Report, which compiles IPCC findings from the last five years, was full of extreme projections, most of them produced by computer models. The distinguished climatologist Dr. Judith Curry is unimpressed and notes that UN climate panic “is more politics than science”.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the current climate narrative is firmly embedded in most mainstream scientific models, as well as the Net Zero business plan. As Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen is fond of noting, the current climate narrative is “absurd”, but trillions of dollars says it’s not absurd. Curry notes that the IPCC reports have become “bumper sticker” climate science – “making a political statement, while using the overall reputation of science to give authority to a politically manufactured consensus”.

In addition, as the Daily Sceptic noted last week, the IPCC is rapidly descending into wokedom. The Daily Caller counted 31 variations of the words ‘equity’ and ‘inequality’ in the 36-page Synthesis Report. Variations of ‘inclusive’ and ‘inclusion’ appear 17 times, and there are mentions of colonialism and social justice. A recent set of published minutes for a major IPCC meeting last October was liberally sprinkled with the need to solicit ‘scientific’ input based on identity, gender and age.

Curry notes that the IPCC reports include some good material, but the accompanying Summary for Policymakers (SPM) for the Synthesis “emphasises weakly justified findings on climate impacts driven by extreme emission scenarios, and politicised policy recommendations on emissions reductions”.

What has happened is quite simple to understand. Global warming has run out of steam, while a 40-year climate model history of over-predicting  temperature rises is becoming increasingly embarrassing. As a result, extreme carbon dioxide emission scenarios are no longer justified. Curry reports that scenarios known as RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 which forecast global rises of 4-5°C degrees within less than 80 years have been quietly dropped. They are now “recognised as implausible”. But most of the extreme responses – as well as the pulpit fulminations from hysterics such as Al ‘Rain Bombs’ Gore and UN Secretary-General Antonio ‘Highway to Climate Hell’ Guterres – are based on these predictions.

Both scenarios have been removed from the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Climate Agreement, but, notes Curry, the new Synthesis Report continues to emphasise these extreme scenarios, while burying in a footnote the caveat that “very high emission scenarios have become less likely but cannot be ruled out”. The reduction in temperature projections is huge since it cuts the figure by two thirds. “Rejecting these extreme scenarios has rendered obsolete much of the climate literature and assessments of the past decade,” concludes Curry.

In other words, some of the scientists have moved on, but the activists and government officials who write the headline summary reports have not. The cynic might ask, why would they? A hard left economic and societal transformation via the command-and-control Net Zero project is a prize they will not willingly give up.

Curry adds: “Clearly the climate ‘crisis’ isn’t what it used to be. Rather than acknowledge this fact as good news, the IPCC and UN officials are doubling down on the alarm regarding the urgency of reducing emissions by eliminating fossil fuel. You might think that if warming is less than we thought, then the priorities would shift away from emission reductions and towards reducing our vulnerability to weather and climate extremes. However, that hasn’t been the case. … With its explicit political advocacy, combined with misleading information, the IPCC risks losing its privileged position in international policy debates.”

The capture of large parts of the IPCC by political activists has been evident for some time. Many within the UN don’t even bother to hide the control that is exerted to ensure just one doomsday climate message is presented to the wider public. Last year its Under-Secretary for Global Communications, Melissa Fleming, told delegates at a World Economic Forum disinformation seminar that we “own” climate science – and she thinks the world should know it.

Last year, the retired physicist Dr. Ralph Alexander wrote an illuminating paper that showed how science in the IPCC reports is twisted to fit a political narrative through the accompanying SPM. Further spin is then applied to press releases which are duly reported as fact by an obedient media. The progression from the initial IPCC report to press release provided “ample opportunities” for the message to be distorted “either wilfully or not”.

An SPM produced last year revived the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph showing little global warming over 2,000 years, followed by a sudden and dramatic uptick over the last 150 years. The hockey stick first appeared in the third IPCC assessment in 2001, but was omitted from subsequent work. It was the creation of the IPCC author Michael Mann, and was widely debunked since it ignored the higher temperatures in the medieval warming period and subsequent cooling in the little ice age.

 

 Alexander noted that Figure 1 above showed clearly how the IPCC’s science can be lost in translation. Figure 1 did not appear in the body of the full IPCC AR6 report. But it is presented in the SPM which was said to be a more concise guide to the full report. Meanwhile, the accompanying press release claimed many recent changes in the climate were unprecedented over thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years. Alexander noted that there was no justification for calling changes unprecedented – the press release had “no basis” in either the AR6 report or the SPM, he said.

For her part, Curry concludes that the IPCC has increasingly taken on a stance of “explicit political advocacy”, but is misleading policymakers with its emphasis on extreme climate outcomes driven by implausible extreme emissions scenarios.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

 The IPCC is Promoting a Left-Wing Political Agenda Masquerading as ‘Science’ – The Daily Sceptic