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.
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.
