I looked at the figure in the report. WG1 says just before the table:
There is low confidence in the emergence of heavy precipitation and pluvial and river flood frequency in observations, despite trends that have been found in a few regions
Literally 3 pages later, after the table discussed here, there is a cross chapter box from WG2 that says
Frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation events increased at the global scale over a majority of land regions with good observational coverage (high confidence)
Didn't whoever put this together realise the absurdity of this?
The fact that WG2 appears to disagree with WG1 here is a big issue. IMO your analysis based on WG1 is not going to land with undecided members of the public so long as there appears to be an IPCC working group that disagrees with you. That’s just my take on the reality of the distribution of credibility on these issues.
Have you ever done a piece on why WG2 appears to come out differently from the table by WG1?
Simply confirms everything we already knew, this Patrick Brown will never work in Academia again, i hope he's rich and has enough F*** you money.
As he now works for The Breakthrough Institute i foresee that organization being attacked mercilessly, hopefully their funding does not leave them open to typical smear attacks.
Anything they can do to avoid addressing the substance of his allegations, that will be direction taken.
Is this any way to run the (business) of government where laws and policies are made that affect billions of people? First, it is an unrealistic scenario (RCP 8.5) which badly skews the results. These erroneous results are then further exaggerated by SPM authors.
In my business if I was given this quality of information and analysis to make decisions those providing it to me would be looking for employment elsewhere yet we tolerate this from our governments.
And where are the scientists whose science is being misrepresented by the SPM? Why are they not standing up and calling bs on this?
'So, if people move to Florida and build lots of real estate the impact of hurricanes will increase even if the frequency and intensity of hurricanes do not change.
On the other hand it may be that the authors of WG2 do not use the same objective measure of climate impact as WG1 (i.e. a change greater than natural variance). The Summary for Policy Makers (which may not be written by the scientists who wrote the body of the report), which you quote, does present the evidence in rather misleading, propagandist and unscientific ways. Just two examples:
First, it states “observed increases in areas burned by wildfires have been attributed to human-induced climate change” – giving the impression that there has been an overall increase in the area burned by wildfires. In fact, evidence from NASA’s satellites show that: “the total number of square kilometres burned each year between 2003 and 2019 has dropped by roughly 25 percent”[1]. (Incidentally NASA say: “on an average day in August, NASA’s satellites detect 10,000 actively burning fires around the world” – so the impression given by the media that forest fires are rare and novel events, explicable only be climate change, is a nonsense.)'
I thought the publishing of this discussion showed a lot of honesty and transparency. I cannot help but think its the way we collectively choose to live that often has nothing to do with Climate change that will cause continued degradation of human thriving. So that's income inequality, corruption, human rights abuses, war, famine, totalitarianism. pollution on many levels, species extinction, economic theft. We are a species that lives predominantly coastally, within a certain band of latitudes for a reason. Collapse is more likely from our own stupidity. It's happened many times before. Drought/war being a strong driver along with disruptions to water/energy supplies. We've also doubled our population in my lifetime without the additional investment to infrastructure.
Since when did being an environmentalist/conservationist mean only discussing climate change? It's such a distraction and waste of resources.
That is the entire point of everything economist Bjorn Lomborg writes and posts, for which he is vilified as a denier (he isn’t) and not a climate scientist ( which he freely admits).
Just stating there are better ways to spend trilllions brings on the Inquisition.
There is practically nothing about modern climate science that isn’t broken.
Roger says if we didn’t have an IPCC we’d have to invent it.
Since the current one is broken I say let’s start over.
If I may, I’d like to pose a question for you, Dr. Pielke, and the many THB readers who regularly contribute to the comment thread. Current policies are bent towards “net-zero emissions” in the coming decades. I’ve seen various target dates – 2032, 2035, 2040, 2050, 2100. Dr. Pielke, you have argued in previous posts of the need to de-carbonize. Fundamentally, I agree with that, and believe we have been moving in that direction (without political urgings) with the general shift from coal to natural gas. You have also pointed out that the predictive models regarding de-carbonization (in essence, the RCPs) are subject to interpretation and misapplication. Indeed, the verdict on warming itself (harmful? or beneficial?) is yet to be determined. (Please let me know if I am incorrect on this statement.)
My question is this: If we have a finite amount of resources (that is, money), would we be prudent to redirect our policy emphasis towards adaption and away from an arbitrary target that could have a negligible impact on atmospherics and a huge impact on economies? A corollary question might be: should the emphasis of “de-carbonization” be redirected toward “optimal power density?” (Robert Bryce would probably agree with that).
I like this. There is still controversy over the precise role, or at least the precise impact, of rising levels of CO2 on the warming that has taken place. Obviously there are multiple other sources of anthropogenic warming in addition to our impact on GHGs, ie deforestation, water use and diversion, ongoing air pollution by other substances, stone and concrete buildings in ever-larger urban centers, vast acreages (eg the Great Plains) of monoculture of crops alien to the ecosystem we replaced, and the rapid encroachment of human settlements into delicate ecosystems. Why the emphasis on decarbonization when, as Barry suggests, we do not have any precise idea regarding the level we would aim for, nor in fact whether we could even influence the level we now have?
My question to Roger is, why does WG1 even include Table 12.12 in its report. 12.12 is based on RCP8.5 which Roger has documented elsewhere is one of the less likely scenarios to the point where some IPCC officials suggest it should be dropped from its reports (see "Unsolicited Advice for the New IPCC Chair").
Are there other similar charts in this WG1 report which are based on much more likely RCP scenarios?
It would make more sense if similar charts based on more likely scenarios were also included in IPCC reports. Just because "we can deduct" what other, more plausible scenarios show, doesn't mean that the mainstream press and the climate apocalyptics will make the same logical deduction.
It would seem that the WG1 are doing people like you and other realists a disservice by not also including charts which illustrate the more likely scenarios.
“ As policy makers begin to better understand what the science really says — versus what they see in the media and hear from promoters of the apocalypse — it will be important to see if more pragmatic and effective approaches emerge on climate policy and politics.”
This demonstrates why everything is so damn difficult today as clearly Lord Benyon is relying on his educated capability to debate a complex topic to defend what has become a luxury cult belief. He accepts and rejects - cherry picks - the science to support his beliefs and is clearly not intellectually honest to get to the bottom of real truth. This is the essence of what is wrong with the world today. Highly educated elites having adopted luxury cult beliefs and using their power, wealth and influence to browbeat everyone else into accepting them. They have no humility here. They might engage in a respectful back and forth for a while, but rest assured if and when they sense they are losing the debate, they will resort to the tactics of censorship and character attacks.
I know that some highly intellectual and educated people on the side of skepticism over climate alarmism like to see this respectful dialog; but having been there and done that for years, I think they are clutching a lost cause. The need is to search for the root cause of the propaganda factory and cut it off at the stem… because clearly the climate alarmism narrative being pushed through the mechanisms of the controlling managerial class has a hidden agenda. This is no longer a scientific debate, it is an information war for control of the global economy.
Something has been gnawing at me, this post reignited it.
Roger keeps wanting to be a little bit pregnant, he keeps talking about how WG1 does good work vs WG2, lots of great science being done by great honest scientists, and how the summary/synthesis reports are activist written bastardizations of the science.
And yet, I hear nothing about masses of upright scientists who contribute to the IPCC standing up and saying they refuse to participate further in the process until those summary reports are loudly and publicly retracted.
I suspect that yet another of the unwritten stories about the IPCC is how many scientists have removed themselves from participation precisely for the reason Pat Robinson describes. Perhaps there are scientists who have stood up and spoken out, but like so many others who contradict a forced consensus, they have been suppressed or forced out. Others may simply keep silent for fear of losing their status and/or their funding. However it must be remembered that there are likely over 5 million scientific and engineering researchers on the planet, and only a few thousand at most participate in WG1. Are they all indeed the best in their fields? Even if they are, their influence is limited.
And the scientists do not write their own summary. They write a draft of the scientific findings, but then it goes to a meeting of politicians, bureaucrats and diplomats who spend days , in the absence of journalists, arguing over every word that will go into the final document, which is the summary for policymakers, a purely political document and not a true summary of the science. According to the previous chairman of the IPCC Pachauri, the IPCC tweaks the document so that the scientific sections accord with the version of reality that was decided by politicians.
The scientists may be experts in their own fields, but they are unlikely to be a match for people with many years of experience in international political intrigue.
Every post here on THB elicits some stereotypical responses.
One category is “Roger, climate change scientists are misunderstanding the effect of CO2 on the climate. You shouldn’t validate them in the first place by accepting on face value that ‘anthropogenic climate change is real and it is a problem.’ “
Another category is, “Roger, climate change scientists are biased by social factors--- wokeism, politics, apocalypse ideology (my favorite), academic groupthink, research money in the billions, etc. You should take a more explicit stand against the obvious social contamination.”
IMO, if Roger took any of this advice, his credibility in academia would vanish instantly. Roger wisely sticks with his narrow academic expertise, which is statistical methods of evidence-informed public policy. There are very few people inside academia that a British Lord could credibly ask for a critical opinion on the IPCC.
It is so revealing to see Lord Benyon, a scientifically educated person, say this: “I would argue that “whites” are not 'not happening',” This reversal of the null hypothesis is the nut of the problem. I variously ascribe this to humans not intuitively grasping the principles of statistical inference--- it took centuries for us to learn this; or, to humans not grasping the categorical difference between prospective data and all other observations--- e.g. calling model runs data. But in the end, I think it’s the siren call of the new apocalypse that probably is the root explanation. You can hear the fear of calamity in Lord Benyon’s writing.
Roger: You are too kind: In a Cambridge or Oxford Union debate Lord Lilley would win this debate easily simply because he relies on an egregiously and transparently flawed source for his arguments. I agree the exchange is courteous and has some substance, but I do not see it as productive or helpful. If Lord Benyon depends largely on WG2 and his peculiar reading of the summary table then he is IMHO no longer talking science but essentially talking ideology where beliefs, assumptions and opinions count more than facts and scientific findings. He is more reasonable than the Baroness, but still appears unwilling to consider the data objectively. I doubt that there is any evidence or data that would make Lord Benyon or Baroness Jones change their stance of Climate change. I would certainly panic if gmsl started to increase at a rate of an inch a year instead of an inch a decade!
I looked at the figure in the report. WG1 says just before the table:
There is low confidence in the emergence of heavy precipitation and pluvial and river flood frequency in observations, despite trends that have been found in a few regions
Literally 3 pages later, after the table discussed here, there is a cross chapter box from WG2 that says
Frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation events increased at the global scale over a majority of land regions with good observational coverage (high confidence)
Didn't whoever put this together realise the absurdity of this?
The fact that WG2 appears to disagree with WG1 here is a big issue. IMO your analysis based on WG1 is not going to land with undecided members of the public so long as there appears to be an IPCC working group that disagrees with you. That’s just my take on the reality of the distribution of credibility on these issues.
Have you ever done a piece on why WG2 appears to come out differently from the table by WG1?
Roger - what did you think of this story?
https://open.substack.com/pub/bariweiss/p/i-overhyped-climate-change-to-get-published?r=gc9hz&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Beat me to it
Amazing, right?
Simply confirms everything we already knew, this Patrick Brown will never work in Academia again, i hope he's rich and has enough F*** you money.
As he now works for The Breakthrough Institute i foresee that organization being attacked mercilessly, hopefully their funding does not leave them open to typical smear attacks.
Anything they can do to avoid addressing the substance of his allegations, that will be direction taken.
Yes, it is spot on. I am thinking about writing on it here. Stay tuned!
Is this any way to run the (business) of government where laws and policies are made that affect billions of people? First, it is an unrealistic scenario (RCP 8.5) which badly skews the results. These erroneous results are then further exaggerated by SPM authors.
In my business if I was given this quality of information and analysis to make decisions those providing it to me would be looking for employment elsewhere yet we tolerate this from our governments.
And where are the scientists whose science is being misrepresented by the SPM? Why are they not standing up and calling bs on this?
This is no way to run a country or society.
Fascinating exchange, congratulations!
'So, if people move to Florida and build lots of real estate the impact of hurricanes will increase even if the frequency and intensity of hurricanes do not change.
On the other hand it may be that the authors of WG2 do not use the same objective measure of climate impact as WG1 (i.e. a change greater than natural variance). The Summary for Policy Makers (which may not be written by the scientists who wrote the body of the report), which you quote, does present the evidence in rather misleading, propagandist and unscientific ways. Just two examples:
First, it states “observed increases in areas burned by wildfires have been attributed to human-induced climate change” – giving the impression that there has been an overall increase in the area burned by wildfires. In fact, evidence from NASA’s satellites show that: “the total number of square kilometres burned each year between 2003 and 2019 has dropped by roughly 25 percent”[1]. (Incidentally NASA say: “on an average day in August, NASA’s satellites detect 10,000 actively burning fires around the world” – so the impression given by the media that forest fires are rare and novel events, explicable only be climate change, is a nonsense.)'
I thought the publishing of this discussion showed a lot of honesty and transparency. I cannot help but think its the way we collectively choose to live that often has nothing to do with Climate change that will cause continued degradation of human thriving. So that's income inequality, corruption, human rights abuses, war, famine, totalitarianism. pollution on many levels, species extinction, economic theft. We are a species that lives predominantly coastally, within a certain band of latitudes for a reason. Collapse is more likely from our own stupidity. It's happened many times before. Drought/war being a strong driver along with disruptions to water/energy supplies. We've also doubled our population in my lifetime without the additional investment to infrastructure.
Since when did being an environmentalist/conservationist mean only discussing climate change? It's such a distraction and waste of resources.
That is the entire point of everything economist Bjorn Lomborg writes and posts, for which he is vilified as a denier (he isn’t) and not a climate scientist ( which he freely admits).
Just stating there are better ways to spend trilllions brings on the Inquisition.
There is practically nothing about modern climate science that isn’t broken.
Roger says if we didn’t have an IPCC we’d have to invent it.
Since the current one is broken I say let’s start over.
Excellent post, sir. One of your best. Thank you.
If I may, I’d like to pose a question for you, Dr. Pielke, and the many THB readers who regularly contribute to the comment thread. Current policies are bent towards “net-zero emissions” in the coming decades. I’ve seen various target dates – 2032, 2035, 2040, 2050, 2100. Dr. Pielke, you have argued in previous posts of the need to de-carbonize. Fundamentally, I agree with that, and believe we have been moving in that direction (without political urgings) with the general shift from coal to natural gas. You have also pointed out that the predictive models regarding de-carbonization (in essence, the RCPs) are subject to interpretation and misapplication. Indeed, the verdict on warming itself (harmful? or beneficial?) is yet to be determined. (Please let me know if I am incorrect on this statement.)
My question is this: If we have a finite amount of resources (that is, money), would we be prudent to redirect our policy emphasis towards adaption and away from an arbitrary target that could have a negligible impact on atmospherics and a huge impact on economies? A corollary question might be: should the emphasis of “de-carbonization” be redirected toward “optimal power density?” (Robert Bryce would probably agree with that).
I like this. There is still controversy over the precise role, or at least the precise impact, of rising levels of CO2 on the warming that has taken place. Obviously there are multiple other sources of anthropogenic warming in addition to our impact on GHGs, ie deforestation, water use and diversion, ongoing air pollution by other substances, stone and concrete buildings in ever-larger urban centers, vast acreages (eg the Great Plains) of monoculture of crops alien to the ecosystem we replaced, and the rapid encroachment of human settlements into delicate ecosystems. Why the emphasis on decarbonization when, as Barry suggests, we do not have any precise idea regarding the level we would aim for, nor in fact whether we could even influence the level we now have?
My question to Roger is, why does WG1 even include Table 12.12 in its report. 12.12 is based on RCP8.5 which Roger has documented elsewhere is one of the less likely scenarios to the point where some IPCC officials suggest it should be dropped from its reports (see "Unsolicited Advice for the New IPCC Chair").
Are there other similar charts in this WG1 report which are based on much more likely RCP scenarios?
This is actually an appropriate use of RCP8.5
Even under this most extreme, implausible scenario many signals will not emerge from background variability by 2100.
We can deduct from this that under more plausible scenarios no signal will emerge by 2100 and (logically) much longer after that.
As well, I’d like to see the results for RCP4.5, which is now a top end scenario under “current policies”
Does this make sense?
Deduce not deduct.
Deduct is what Trudeau does to my salary
"Even under this most extreme, implausible scenario many signals will not emerge from background variability by 2100."
I don't think the report says anything like this. The reader shouldn't have to deduce what the chart might look like under more rational scenarios.
It would make more sense if similar charts based on more likely scenarios were also included in IPCC reports. Just because "we can deduct" what other, more plausible scenarios show, doesn't mean that the mainstream press and the climate apocalyptics will make the same logical deduction.
It would seem that the WG1 are doing people like you and other realists a disservice by not also including charts which illustrate the more likely scenarios.
“ As policy makers begin to better understand what the science really says — versus what they see in the media and hear from promoters of the apocalypse — it will be important to see if more pragmatic and effective approaches emerge on climate policy and politics.”
This demonstrates why everything is so damn difficult today as clearly Lord Benyon is relying on his educated capability to debate a complex topic to defend what has become a luxury cult belief. He accepts and rejects - cherry picks - the science to support his beliefs and is clearly not intellectually honest to get to the bottom of real truth. This is the essence of what is wrong with the world today. Highly educated elites having adopted luxury cult beliefs and using their power, wealth and influence to browbeat everyone else into accepting them. They have no humility here. They might engage in a respectful back and forth for a while, but rest assured if and when they sense they are losing the debate, they will resort to the tactics of censorship and character attacks.
I know that some highly intellectual and educated people on the side of skepticism over climate alarmism like to see this respectful dialog; but having been there and done that for years, I think they are clutching a lost cause. The need is to search for the root cause of the propaganda factory and cut it off at the stem… because clearly the climate alarmism narrative being pushed through the mechanisms of the controlling managerial class has a hidden agenda. This is no longer a scientific debate, it is an information war for control of the global economy.
"Lord Benyon wrote and email..." should be "Lord Benyon wrote an email..."
Thanks for the Eagle eyes!
The ECIU infographic is now at https://eciu.net/analysis/infographics/ipcc-explainer-impacts-adaptation-vulnerability-2
Thank you for this reference. It is an outstanding presentation. Congress could take a lesson in this.
Something has been gnawing at me, this post reignited it.
Roger keeps wanting to be a little bit pregnant, he keeps talking about how WG1 does good work vs WG2, lots of great science being done by great honest scientists, and how the summary/synthesis reports are activist written bastardizations of the science.
And yet, I hear nothing about masses of upright scientists who contribute to the IPCC standing up and saying they refuse to participate further in the process until those summary reports are loudly and publicly retracted.
Crickets.
So much for “honest scientists” participating.
“Silence is violence” to quote the woke/insane.
They are ALL culpable in this mass delusion.
I suspect that yet another of the unwritten stories about the IPCC is how many scientists have removed themselves from participation precisely for the reason Pat Robinson describes. Perhaps there are scientists who have stood up and spoken out, but like so many others who contradict a forced consensus, they have been suppressed or forced out. Others may simply keep silent for fear of losing their status and/or their funding. However it must be remembered that there are likely over 5 million scientific and engineering researchers on the planet, and only a few thousand at most participate in WG1. Are they all indeed the best in their fields? Even if they are, their influence is limited.
And the scientists do not write their own summary. They write a draft of the scientific findings, but then it goes to a meeting of politicians, bureaucrats and diplomats who spend days , in the absence of journalists, arguing over every word that will go into the final document, which is the summary for policymakers, a purely political document and not a true summary of the science. According to the previous chairman of the IPCC Pachauri, the IPCC tweaks the document so that the scientific sections accord with the version of reality that was decided by politicians.
The scientists may be experts in their own fields, but they are unlikely to be a match for people with many years of experience in international political intrigue.
Some good points.
Yes, how many participate in good faith and walk away after the result is mangled, only to be replaced with others who need to eat too?
That would be a good column
Every post here on THB elicits some stereotypical responses.
One category is “Roger, climate change scientists are misunderstanding the effect of CO2 on the climate. You shouldn’t validate them in the first place by accepting on face value that ‘anthropogenic climate change is real and it is a problem.’ “
Another category is, “Roger, climate change scientists are biased by social factors--- wokeism, politics, apocalypse ideology (my favorite), academic groupthink, research money in the billions, etc. You should take a more explicit stand against the obvious social contamination.”
IMO, if Roger took any of this advice, his credibility in academia would vanish instantly. Roger wisely sticks with his narrow academic expertise, which is statistical methods of evidence-informed public policy. There are very few people inside academia that a British Lord could credibly ask for a critical opinion on the IPCC.
Roger has to do Roger. And they destroyed his credibility within academia years ago., by the way.
He calls out the summary/synthesis reports for the bs that they are.
My point about ipcc scientists stands. If they had integrity we’d hear about opposition.
It is so revealing to see Lord Benyon, a scientifically educated person, say this: “I would argue that “whites” are not 'not happening',” This reversal of the null hypothesis is the nut of the problem. I variously ascribe this to humans not intuitively grasping the principles of statistical inference--- it took centuries for us to learn this; or, to humans not grasping the categorical difference between prospective data and all other observations--- e.g. calling model runs data. But in the end, I think it’s the siren call of the new apocalypse that probably is the root explanation. You can hear the fear of calamity in Lord Benyon’s writing.
What an illuminating post. Baroness Jones is probably a subscriber to The Guardian unfortunately.
If I had to guess, I think the Guardian writes the Sumary/Synthesis reports for the IPCC.
Lilley seems to grasp what is going on in that even within the IPCC there is no consensus settle science, as abhorrent as those sciency terms are.
That is the main message in this, I think.
Roger: You are too kind: In a Cambridge or Oxford Union debate Lord Lilley would win this debate easily simply because he relies on an egregiously and transparently flawed source for his arguments. I agree the exchange is courteous and has some substance, but I do not see it as productive or helpful. If Lord Benyon depends largely on WG2 and his peculiar reading of the summary table then he is IMHO no longer talking science but essentially talking ideology where beliefs, assumptions and opinions count more than facts and scientific findings. He is more reasonable than the Baroness, but still appears unwilling to consider the data objectively. I doubt that there is any evidence or data that would make Lord Benyon or Baroness Jones change their stance of Climate change. I would certainly panic if gmsl started to increase at a rate of an inch a year instead of an inch a decade!
Yes, Benyon is in line for a higher place in the climatism faith structure. Jones wants to be pope.
It must be very gratifying for you to see the reach that you and THB have achieved. Congratulations and well done.