A newly leaked revised draft of the upcoming IPCC report suggests that the climate uncertainties have significantly grown since the last report in 2007.
Most important of all, the new IPCC draft finally admits that the climate has not warmed as predicted and that the climate field does not know why.
They recognize the global warming ‘pause’ first reported by The Mail on Sunday last year is real – and concede that their computer models did not predict it. But they cannot explain why world average temperatures have not shown any statistically significant increase since 1997.
They admit large parts of the world were as warm as they are now for decades at a time between 950 and 1250 AD – centuries before the Industrial Revolution, and when the population and CO2 levels were both much lower.
The IPCC admits that while computer models forecast a decline in Antarctic sea ice, it has actually grown to a new record high. Again, the IPCC cannot say why.
A forecast in the 2007 report that hurricanes would become more intense has simply been dropped, without mention. This year has been one of the quietest hurricane seasons in history and the US is currently enjoying its longest-ever period – almost eight years – without a single hurricane of Category 3 or above making landfall.
The worst aspect of this new draft, however, is how its conclusions completely ignore these admitted uncertainties.
In the new report, the IPCC says it is ‘extremely likely’ – 95 per cent certain – that human influence caused more than half the temperature rises from 1951 to 2010, up from ‘very confident’ – 90 per cent certain – in 2007. [Climate scientists Judith] Curry said: ‘This is incomprehensible to me’ – adding that the IPCC projections are ‘overconfident’, especially given the report’s admitted areas of doubt.
As I’ve noted before, though Curry favors the theory that the climate is warming, she is also a good scientist willing to honestly discuss the uncertainties of the science.
One last point: Most of these newly admitted uncertainties in the upcoming IPCC report were originally discussed in detail in the first IPCC report back in 1990. That 1990 report was an excellent and fair assessment of the overall knowledge of the field, at the time. Since then, none of the science has really been able to reduce any of these uncertainties significantly. All that happened in the ensuing years is that too many climate scientists and in the IPCC decided to make believe the uncertainties didn’t exist any more. Thus, later IPCC reports were filled with false certainty and an unreasonable insistence that the climate field understood what was going on.
These false certainties have now come back to bite that climate field, in the ass.
