The intensity and number of TCs in the North Atlantic is believed to vary with the AMO. If one re-analyzes the original data in Kossin (2020) to ask what fraction of the "global" increase in hurricanes could due to the change in the AMO between Kossin's early (1979-1997) and late (1998-2017) periods, you will find that:
Total TC's outside the North Atlantic DECREASED by 5%, while major NA TC's increased by only 4%.
Total TC's in the NA increased by 102%, while major TC's there increased by 289%!
Globally, Total and Major TCs increased by 5% (vs -5% outside the NA) and 20% (vs 4%).
By focusing their analysis on the increase in the PERCENTAGE of major hurricanes , Kossin (2020) have obscured the fact that the only significant change in TC NUMBER with "global warming" occurred in the AMO-perturbed North Atlantic.
Now that Roger has made us aware of the correction to Kossin (2020), I reanalyzed the corrected data. However, first I had to correct a mistake in the correction: Kossin (2020) kept uncorrected values for both global total and major TC's in the late period, even though they corrected those values in the early period to reflect changes in individual basins. Assuming my calculations are correct, these values should be 8700 total late TC's (not 9275) and 3242 major late TC's (not 2842). Add up the values for the individual basins.
Total AND major TC's outside the NA BOTH DECREASED by 17% and 13% respectively.
Total TC's in the NA increased by 94%, while major TC's there increased by 234%!
Globally, Total TC's changed by -8% (vs -17% outside the NA) and while major TC's changed by +1% (vs -13% outside the NA).
With my corrections, there is NO significant change in the percentage of major hurricanes globally (+3%) or globally outside the NA (+2%). For individual basins, the 11% increase the percentage of major hurricanes in the NA (from 23% to 34%) and the 9% DECREASE in the percentage of major hurricanes in the WP (from 43% to 34%) may be significant.
I’ve been through a decent part of chapter 11 of AR6 (extreme weather). If there’s bad news it makes it to the summary. If there’s good news it doesn’t make it to the summary, or is obscured:
Long term decline in severe tropical cyclones - **good news** - doesn’t get a mention (caveat that we don’t have global data, but this doesn’t prevent bad news getting in where there isn’t global data). A 30-40 decline in accumulated cyclone energy - **good news** - makes it in as "intensifying tropical cyclones". See the article for details.
We don’t have data on global trends in floods - that doesn’t make it in. You’d think that would be important to stress.
We do have trends in heavy rainfall - up in some places, down in others, overall up - **bad news**. This makes it into the summary as "increasing heavy rainfall".
We do have trends in peak streamflow (think, risk of floods from rivers and waterways) - down in some places, up in others, overall down - ** good news**. This only makes it into the summary as "increasing in many places, decreasing in others". So no one learns about the good news unless they read the detail of the chapter.
The executive summary for chapter 11 says "Significant trends in peak streamflow have been observed in some regions over the past decades".
So, preliminary conclusion: safe pairs of hands are appointed to guide the flow of the report.
Thanks Roger, I remember reading this a while back.
I'm currently going through the AR6 section on droughts and even there I'm wondering whether their treatment of the subject is fair. Hopefully, I'll have made sense of this in the next couple of weeks.
Example:
Multifaceted characteristics of dryland aridity changes in a warming world
Xu Lian, Nature 2021:
"Although warming heightens vapour pressure deficit and, thus, atmospheric demand for water in both the observations and the projections, these changes do not wholly propagate to exacerbate soil moisture and runoff deficits.
Moreover, counter-intuitively, many arid ecosystems have exhibited significant greening and enhanced vegetation productivity since the 1980s"
Climate Change and Drought: the Soil Moisture Perspective, Alexis Berg & Justin Sheffield 2018:
"The notion that a warmer climate leads to a drier land surface, i.e., increased water stress, driven overwhelming by the effect of warmer temperatures on evaporative demand, appears, however, inconsistent with paleo-evidence and vegetation reconstructions for different colder and warmer past climates…
...over the last four decades, global greening, i.e., a widespread increase in leaf area index (LAI) measured by satellite, has been observed, including in semi-arid areas ..would appear inconsistent with a concurrent increase in soil moisture deficits and vegetation water stress."
The distinction between hydrological, meteorological and soil moisture deficits is scientifically accurate. However Ch.11 finds no detection or attribution at the global level for the first two, but by the time it gets to the summaries the 3-part distinction is lost and it is all just “drought.”
One of the more depressing things I observe here is that in many respects you could have written this post a decade or more ago and it would still be accurate. Obviously there are newer papers such as those by Grinsted and Kossin but the IPCC makes the same basic errors over and over again: cherry picking papers and data and then playing telephone so that the SPM says confidently that something is happening while the relevant detailed WG chapter says something slightly different may be happening but that it is a low confidence observation
I suppose it shouldn't really be too surprising, the incentives are stacked such that if the IPCC says "global warming is no big deal" then all the contributors are out of a job
Dr. Pielke, I wanted to point out a few things wrt Dr. Kossin and his papers that are mentioned above. Kossin was a lead author of AR6 WG1 Chapter 11, so the IPCC report was very much aware of the correction to Kossin et al 2020. To clarify, the primary claim of that paper was a statistically significant increase globally in the proportion of "major" hurricane fixes to all hurricane-force fixes. At a basin level, the paper only claimed statistical significance for the North Atlantic. The paper acknowledged that there was no statistically significant increase in the Pacific basins, for example. The yellow highlights in the original vs. corrected charts shown above aren't any different. The original paper reported statistical significance less than 90% (e.g., not significant) for 4 basins, and the correction used the n/s symbol to indicate the same thing for those same 4 basins. There's no problem there.
What is questionable is whether Kossin's global metric for the corrected dataset is actually significant at the 95% confidence level. Despite the fact that the global increase declined from 15% in the original paper to only 10% in the correction, Kossin still claims statistical significance for the corrected dataset, but only by playing games with significant figures. Notice that the correction reports the proportion out to 4 decimal places rather than the 2 decimal places in the original paper. If you check the confidence intervals reported for the global data, you can see the two time periods almost overlap: [0.3243,0.3555] vs. [0.3559,0.3891]. If Kossin had stuck to the same number of significant figures as was originally used, then the confidence intervals would have overlapped and his results would not have been significant. Of course, this would have negated the primary claim of the paper and forced a full retraction. Ooops. To avoid that problem, Kossin added some extra digits, although it is hard to justify such a level of precision with the dataset that was used. Although I'm not much for statistics, it may be worse than that. I recalculated the confidence intervals for Kossin's correction and came up with different numbers. If I'm correct, then the CIs do in fact overlap and and the global results aren't (yet) significant for data up through 2017. See https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/34364/. This would mean that Kossin jumped the gun and claimed global statistical significance for his proportion a few years before the data will actually support that claim... Until the AMO switches to the cold phase and the Atlantic basin settles down.
Switching gears to the IPCC's claims wrt disaster losses for hurricanes wrt Grinsted et al 2019, I think it's significant that the IPCC refers to Kossin 2019. That paper found a significant decrease in TC translation speed in the CONUS over the last 120 years. It would seem that that IPCC was implying that slower-moving storms could be the physical cause of the supposed increased damage. Since the IPCC acknowledged that there has been no increase in the number of landfalling storms, it seems necessary to find some other plausible physical cause for Grinsted's claim of increased damage. On its face, slower moving storms could fit that bill -- e.g., slower moving storms subject coastal areas to winds and surges for longer periods of time and could lead to more damage. It seems to me that this was the point that the IPCC was trying to make, however ineptly. Perhaps the language was rather awkward because they couldn't make this claim too directly because it is utter conjecture. Perhaps the IPCC reasoned it was better to awkwardly offer an unsupported claim of a plausible physical cause for Grinsted's increased damage rather than have no physical cause at all. At any rate, even a casual investigation of Kossin 2019 shows that is doesn't help Grinsted's claim very much. The correlation between annual translation speed and Grinsted's ATD-normalized hurricane damage is quite poor.
Some of the years with highest normalized losses per Grinsted had higher-than-average translation speeds, and some of the years with very slow moving storms had very low losses. Moreover, the timing of the changes don't align well. Kossin 2019 shows a downward trend in speeds over the last 120 years only because storms were very fast in the 1920s and 1950s and then collapsed. Since reaching a low point in 1970, however, 10-year average translation speed has steadily increased over the last 50 years. Grinsted's "normalized" losses have increased most significantly over the last 40 years, when storms were regaining speed. Faster-moving storms, of course, cannot possibly the cause of the increased damage that Grinsted claimed to find. All of that to say that citing Kossin 2019 was a red herring, and Grinsted's alleged increase in normalized damage is left without a physical cause.
Apparently, I misspoke when I asked about forcings. What I really find confusing are feedback effects. Regarding feedback effects, I have seen suggestions ranging from that these are powerfully negative to claims that they don’t exist. Help! I could probably use a basic lesson in forcing versus feedback as well as whatever insight you can provide on the controversy regarding the effects of feedback. Thank you!
“Forcing” is how you take a likely 1c ECS for doubling co2, assuming even that number is real, and then saying that 1c will cause a bunch of other factors to accelerate and, yes of course, kill us all.
I was thinking of forcing in the sense of feedback effects that may flow from a change in CO2 and positively or negatively affect the climate. As I understand it (help me, Roger!), 'forcings' are how scientists derive some (or many?) of the effects CO2 is supposed to have on the climate. Happy to hear from anyone who can explain these forces to this non-scientist.
Hi Pamela, My dad’s next post is on ocean heat content. After that I’ll ask him to do forcings and feedbacks which is something he has written a lot about. Thanks!
David H. Jackson,MD Please:more simplification is needed for us who are simple-who are not climatologists-statisticians! I get your overall conclusions(I think) but a conclusion paragraph or two in simple language would be much appreciated. Otherwise I fear you are "preaching to the choir"! Last of all,it appears that Summaries for Policymakers(SPMs) and Synthesis Report are often in error so how can non-climatologists get accurate information? Are we to read the several thousand pages of AR6(which appear to be misleading as well)?
The several thousand pages of AR6 misleading as well. The fact that they are misleading is , however, obscured by attachment of unusual and deceptive meanings to statistical terms such that the axiom of probability theory and assumption of mathematical statistics called "unit measure" appears to be satisfied by the argument made by a climate model though in reality, "unit measure" is falsified by this argument. "Unit measure" is the proposition that "1 is the value of the measure of an event that is certain to occur." Under Aristotle's Laws of Thought, the value is 0, 1 or 2. That the value is 0 falsifies the Law of the Excluded Middle (LEM) and "unit measure." That the value is 2 falsifies the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC) and "unit measure." That the value is 1 satisfies the LEM, LNC and "unit measure." The argument made by the IPCC in AR6 can be proven to falsify the LEM and "unit measure." T
If they REALLY cared about emissions (hint: they don't), they would institute the Revenue Neutral Carbon Fee & Dividend. The CF&D penalizes the energy hog rich and rewards the energy frugal middle class & poor. While carbon trading grants government guaranteed giant profits for the wealthy. Really just another devious wealth transfer scheme from the Middle Class to the Rich. Very important, that you must also eliminate all the preferential subsidies, mandates and exemptions given to the political favorites wind & solar. They are favorites because they cost $trillions but do zip to reduce fossil consumption, apart from causing energy poverty --> reduced emissions. The Net Zero, carbon credits trading operation is just a giant greenwashing scam, almost entirely worthless:
EXPOSED: The Biggest Green SCAM In ESG | Breaking Points, Krystal breaks down the corporate scam of ESG and carbon offset programs in the USA:
Newbie question here. I'm probably misunderstanding the concept but what I think I read was that there is no increase in damage associated with cyclones. If that's right it makes no sense when you consider that there has been a great deal of development in the last 100 years, especially in the tropics, and hence more stuff for cyclones to mess up, even if there is no change to the frequency of storms.
The increase in development is precisely the problem that needs to be addressed in order to compare disaster losses at different times. In order to make meaningful comparisons of disaster losses over time, it is necessary to normalize the data to remove any impact caused by increases in property value put in harms way through increased development. Dr. Pielke invented the standard methodology for normalizing disaster losses by adjusting for changes in wealth over time. Due to limitations in the availability of data a century ago, the conventional methodology uses population as a proxy for wealth. You can think of the normalization scheme as essentially adjusting disaster losses in current dollars (which are assumed to be 2x insured losses) by changes in population, per capita wealth, and inflation. After the loss data is normalized for those factors, then differences in losses between events in different years can be attributed to changes in the characteristics of the disasters that caused those losses. The conventional normalization process invented by Dr. Pielke adjusts for differences across time (or temporal differences). For example, consider the Great Miami hurricane. In 1926, that hurricane caused $105 million dollars of losses among the 117K people that lived in the affected area. The conventional normalization scheme determines what the current dollars losses would be if that same storm hit Miami now. If the Great Miami hurricane had made landfall in 2018, it would have caused $236 billion dollars losses among the 4.5 million people that live in the affected area in modern times. In that context, the $60 billion of losses from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 doesn't look quite so big. Enabling such context is precisely what normalization schemes that remove artificial changes (like changes in the value of property along the coastline) enables us to do.
Grinsted acknowledged that the conventional methodology is good at normalizing for differences of time, but he argued that this wasn't adequate. Grinsted et al's 2019 offered a novel methodology that was claims to adjust for both temporal differences and spatial differences. In other words, Grinsted argues that it isn't sufficient merely to adjust losses from the Great Miami hurricane for changes in wealth over time (e.g., 1926 vs 2018). Grinsted also claimed it is necessary to adjust losses by changes in wealth across different geographic locations (e.g., the city of Miami vs. some largely unsettled rural coast line). Grinsted offered a new methodology that was claimed to normalize for both temporal and spatial/location differences. Grinsted's results show a significant increase in normalized hurricane disaster losses. Dr. Pielke has heavily criticized Grinsted for using a hodge-podge corrupted dataset. It is also an outlier whose results are contradicted by numerous other studies of hurricane normalized losses. Furthermore, Grinsted's claim of increased normalized disaster losses isn't supported by trends in the attributes of hurricanes. Disaster losses are an effect, and every effect has a cause. If disaster losses are increasing, then there must be something about hurricanes that has likewise changed in order to produce the effect of increased losses. Hurricane data shows that the number of landfalling storms hasn't increased, and neither has the intensity of landfalling storms (e.g., "major hurricanes"). Other possible "causes" are sometimes conjectured in the literature, but none have stood up to criticism. For example, we all know that hurricanes drop in intensity quite rapidly after they make landfall. A 2020 paper (Li and Chakraborty) claimed that the intensity rate "decay" of hurricanes after landfall was slowing down such that storms were maintaining higher intensity as they moved inland, which the paper suggested could cause greater property losses. That claim did not hold up because the trend they claimed to see was caused solely by hurricanes that, after making landfall, turned back and passed over the ocean where they retained or increased their intensity. Of course, hurricanes that return to the sea, especially far out to sea, aren't doing damage to property on land. In the end, there is no characteristic of hurricanes that can account for an increasing trend in normalized losses. And without a plausible physical cause from a change in hurricanes, Grinsted's claim of increased losses must be spurious.
Roughly, I think it's no change per unit exposure. The dollar value of damage has increaed but the inflation adjusted value of exposure has increased as much or more so that the ratio is level or decreasing.
Great post. Once again, there is that mention of forcing, a concept that I still struggle to understand. Consider this a nudge not to leave us hanging with a lack of understanding of what forcings are, written in your wonderfully clear style. And I have one more item to add to my ever-growing list of questions: is there really such a thing as global climate and, if so, why does it matter if the effects are local and "global" just means the averaging of a lot of local numbers?
In a recent paper Roger made available for us to read he quotes the IPCC as defining radiative forcing as “the change in the net, downward minus upward, radiative flux (expressed in Watts per square meter; W/m2 ) at the tropopause or top of atmosphere due to a change in an external driver of climate change, such as, for example, a change in the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) or the output of the Sun.” I wonder, what's an internal driver of climate change?
I am with Mark here. I once worked in a government management lab that did QA/QC on our lab work. An academic doing related work did not. Sh said her research budget did not allow for it. I told her I wouldn’t be allowing research without QA/QC to influence our management. Of course it ultimately did, but should it have?
Let’s dream of an optimal IPCC .. 1. Pay people to work on it so they are sure to be careful. 2. Assign responsibility and accountability for sections to specific individuals. 3. Have formal reviewed QA/QC processes. 4. Allow scientists outside the group to review the draft in an open forum.5. If disputes arise, keep a third party panel in place to resolve them, and make the discussions of that group transparent.
Roger, about a year or so ago I commented that the IPCC process for developing the SPM's was hopelessly politicized and biased and that whatever "good science" that was being done was subject to misrepresentation and exploitation by this process. You replied back to me that you didn't pay much attention to the SPM's (I think you even said that you didn't read them). Unfortunately I am unable to find my comment and your response. As a big part of the problems you are discussing here are associated with the SPM's, it appears that you may have reevaluated your position.
In addition, to call out the IPCC for having quality control problems, while true, misses the larger problem afflicting the IPCC and in fact the entire UN.
The problems with the IPCC go way beyond mere quality control. I assume that you know the difference between QC (Quality Control) and QA (Quality Assurance). I am not a QA/QC expert but as a reminder I offer the following: "Quality assurance is a process based approach while quality control is a product based approach. Quality assurance involves processes managing quality, and quality control is used to verify the quality of the product. Quality audit is an example of quality assurance."
Does the IPCC have a QA plan including objectives, procedures, audits etc.? I doubt it. If I am wrong please point me to it. It is typical in any modern significant undertaking such as software development, engineering and construction of buildings, bridges, pipelines, offshore platforms etc. to have such a plan. In fact, it is virtually impossible in today's world to undertake a major project without one. Simplistically, QC procedures are typically mandated by the QA plan and must meet objectives of the QA plan.
While both of the issues you discuss in today's post are examples of sloppy checking, writing and editing which fall under the rubric of QC, the problems go way beyond simply sloppy work and checking.
In the first case "cherry picking", were the authors truly not familiar with the relevant literature, did they not know of your work. Did they make honest mistakes that should have been picked up by straight forward peer review? Why were you not asked to review this work? I think the answers to these questions are obvious.
In the second example on TC trends you do a yeoman's job of digging through which report says what etc. However calling the mischaracterization at the higher levels an oversight is like saying that an IRS agent showing up at Matt Taibbi's house on the day he testified before Congress is just a coincidence. Let's back off from all of the digging through reports to find who said what when. I think the main question is when there is "low confidence" in something like TC trends why does the IPCC highlight it in the most alarmist way possible? Should "findings" that they have low confidence in even be distinguished from the inverse trend? How man low confidence "findings" that go against the preferred UN narrative can you find? I think that all of us here know the answers to these questions.
Improving QC (checking) will not solve IPCC's problems and they'll never write a QA plan because it would have to be so obviously biased and political.
I'm from a construction background (32yrs+) and I agree that all projects have QA and QC procedures, but they don't guarantee a quality output. They do help mitigate against many quality issues though. I think the IPCC is so politicised now that implementation of such wouldn't make any difference - Roger shows perfectly in this and last weeks article that cherry picking data is wholly acceptable so long as it supports the orthodoxy. They are so far down their (catastrophe) rabbit hole that I can't see them ever emerging with something that reality. The worrying thing is how many people quote the IPCC and it's predictions of catastrophes with impunity. It take people like Roger to dig through the data to disprove them, but often the damage is already done.
Agreed. My issue is that calling it a QC problem implies a (readily fixable)lack of routine checking. As you say, the problem is much deeper. It involves politicization, not surprising when it comes to the UN, but of Science as well. It also involves the lack of integrity of the scientists and analysts that participate in the IPCC who keep quiet when their work is misrepresented or distorted in the name of the UN's overriding catastrophe narrative.
I think Roger does yeoman's work pointing out errors and distortions in the IPCC's work. However his insistence that the IPCC is indispensable and that it just needs a few tweaks here and there is naive and understates the nature and severity of the problem.
Agreed - I too think the IPCC should be razed to the ground. I suspect Roger is saying it his way so he can he and keep some constructive dialogue with them. Any objective assessment of the IPCC must surely conclude it is politicised and biased in favour of catastrophe. Check out John Dodders on Twitter for a thread which shows some of the more ridiculous predictions (it made me smile)...
I understand, but if Roger doesn't yet understand that you just can't walk a fine line with these fanatics I'm afraid he never will. Look what they've already done to him, the Grejalva stuff, not seeking his review of the material that is clearly in his wheel house, banishing him to a windowless basement office, etc. Look at what they have done to Judith Curry, and Bjorn Lomborg is totally persona non grata. Look what they are doing to Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger.
Once again my head is spinning because of my lack of education in climate science. While the details of your takedown of IPCC are confusing, your conclusion is crystal clear. I'm working on finding a way to express these propagandist reports from IPCC for any letters to the editors, etc. that I may decide to try to write.
In particular, I really like the last quotation offered below by Jerome Ravetz: "... If you simply go to history with a thesis and you look up the documents to try to prove it, then you are not really being a historian, you are being a propagandist "
Climate "science" is actually a pseudoscience that is dressed up to look like a science by an application of the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness by the argument that is made by a climate model. Under this application of this fallacy, an "abstract" event of the future for Earth's climate system is mistaken for a "concrete" event of the future where an "abstract" event of the future is "abstracted" (removed) from a location in space and time but a "concrete" event of the future has such a location. A collection of "concrete" events of the future is an example of a statistical population but a collection of "abstract" events of the future is not. Conequently the argument made by a climate model lacks the empirical support of a statistical population but is dressed up to look like it has this support.
The intensity and number of TCs in the North Atlantic is believed to vary with the AMO. If one re-analyzes the original data in Kossin (2020) to ask what fraction of the "global" increase in hurricanes could due to the change in the AMO between Kossin's early (1979-1997) and late (1998-2017) periods, you will find that:
Total TC's outside the North Atlantic DECREASED by 5%, while major NA TC's increased by only 4%.
Total TC's in the NA increased by 102%, while major TC's there increased by 289%!
Globally, Total and Major TCs increased by 5% (vs -5% outside the NA) and 20% (vs 4%).
By focusing their analysis on the increase in the PERCENTAGE of major hurricanes , Kossin (2020) have obscured the fact that the only significant change in TC NUMBER with "global warming" occurred in the AMO-perturbed North Atlantic.
Now that Roger has made us aware of the correction to Kossin (2020), I reanalyzed the corrected data. However, first I had to correct a mistake in the correction: Kossin (2020) kept uncorrected values for both global total and major TC's in the late period, even though they corrected those values in the early period to reflect changes in individual basins. Assuming my calculations are correct, these values should be 8700 total late TC's (not 9275) and 3242 major late TC's (not 2842). Add up the values for the individual basins.
Total AND major TC's outside the NA BOTH DECREASED by 17% and 13% respectively.
Total TC's in the NA increased by 94%, while major TC's there increased by 234%!
Globally, Total TC's changed by -8% (vs -17% outside the NA) and while major TC's changed by +1% (vs -13% outside the NA).
With my corrections, there is NO significant change in the percentage of major hurricanes globally (+3%) or globally outside the NA (+2%). For individual basins, the 11% increase the percentage of major hurricanes in the NA (from 23% to 34%) and the 9% DECREASE in the percentage of major hurricanes in the WP (from 43% to 34%) may be significant.
This essay by Bjorn Lomborg, written for National Review, keeps things fairly simple and straight forward.
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/04/17/life-after-climate-change/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module
This OPED by Judith Curry sums it up very well:
https://judithcurry.com/2023/03/28/uns-climate-panic-is-more-politics-than-science/#more-29950
I’ve been through a decent part of chapter 11 of AR6 (extreme weather). If there’s bad news it makes it to the summary. If there’s good news it doesn’t make it to the summary, or is obscured:
https://scienceofdoom.substack.com/p/summary-on-trends-in-tropical-cyclones
Long term decline in severe tropical cyclones - **good news** - doesn’t get a mention (caveat that we don’t have global data, but this doesn’t prevent bad news getting in where there isn’t global data). A 30-40 decline in accumulated cyclone energy - **good news** - makes it in as "intensifying tropical cyclones". See the article for details.
https://scienceofdoom.substack.com/p/summary-on-trends-in-extreme-rainfall
We don’t have data on global trends in floods - that doesn’t make it in. You’d think that would be important to stress.
We do have trends in heavy rainfall - up in some places, down in others, overall up - **bad news**. This makes it into the summary as "increasing heavy rainfall".
We do have trends in peak streamflow (think, risk of floods from rivers and waterways) - down in some places, up in others, overall down - ** good news**. This only makes it into the summary as "increasing in many places, decreasing in others". So no one learns about the good news unless they read the detail of the chapter.
The executive summary for chapter 11 says "Significant trends in peak streamflow have been observed in some regions over the past decades".
So, preliminary conclusion: safe pairs of hands are appointed to guide the flow of the report.
I think this is fair
Here is my summary:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/how-to-understand-the-new-ipcc-report-1e3
Thanks Roger, I remember reading this a while back.
I'm currently going through the AR6 section on droughts and even there I'm wondering whether their treatment of the subject is fair. Hopefully, I'll have made sense of this in the next couple of weeks.
Example:
Multifaceted characteristics of dryland aridity changes in a warming world
Xu Lian, Nature 2021:
"Although warming heightens vapour pressure deficit and, thus, atmospheric demand for water in both the observations and the projections, these changes do not wholly propagate to exacerbate soil moisture and runoff deficits.
Moreover, counter-intuitively, many arid ecosystems have exhibited significant greening and enhanced vegetation productivity since the 1980s"
Climate Change and Drought: the Soil Moisture Perspective, Alexis Berg & Justin Sheffield 2018:
"The notion that a warmer climate leads to a drier land surface, i.e., increased water stress, driven overwhelming by the effect of warmer temperatures on evaporative demand, appears, however, inconsistent with paleo-evidence and vegetation reconstructions for different colder and warmer past climates…
...over the last four decades, global greening, i.e., a widespread increase in leaf area index (LAI) measured by satellite, has been observed, including in semi-arid areas ..would appear inconsistent with a concurrent increase in soil moisture deficits and vegetation water stress."
The distinction between hydrological, meteorological and soil moisture deficits is scientifically accurate. However Ch.11 finds no detection or attribution at the global level for the first two, but by the time it gets to the summaries the 3-part distinction is lost and it is all just “drought.”
Again, a bit too clever.
One of the more depressing things I observe here is that in many respects you could have written this post a decade or more ago and it would still be accurate. Obviously there are newer papers such as those by Grinsted and Kossin but the IPCC makes the same basic errors over and over again: cherry picking papers and data and then playing telephone so that the SPM says confidently that something is happening while the relevant detailed WG chapter says something slightly different may be happening but that it is a low confidence observation
I suppose it shouldn't really be too surprising, the incentives are stacked such that if the IPCC says "global warming is no big deal" then all the contributors are out of a job
Dr. Pielke, I wanted to point out a few things wrt Dr. Kossin and his papers that are mentioned above. Kossin was a lead author of AR6 WG1 Chapter 11, so the IPCC report was very much aware of the correction to Kossin et al 2020. To clarify, the primary claim of that paper was a statistically significant increase globally in the proportion of "major" hurricane fixes to all hurricane-force fixes. At a basin level, the paper only claimed statistical significance for the North Atlantic. The paper acknowledged that there was no statistically significant increase in the Pacific basins, for example. The yellow highlights in the original vs. corrected charts shown above aren't any different. The original paper reported statistical significance less than 90% (e.g., not significant) for 4 basins, and the correction used the n/s symbol to indicate the same thing for those same 4 basins. There's no problem there.
What is questionable is whether Kossin's global metric for the corrected dataset is actually significant at the 95% confidence level. Despite the fact that the global increase declined from 15% in the original paper to only 10% in the correction, Kossin still claims statistical significance for the corrected dataset, but only by playing games with significant figures. Notice that the correction reports the proportion out to 4 decimal places rather than the 2 decimal places in the original paper. If you check the confidence intervals reported for the global data, you can see the two time periods almost overlap: [0.3243,0.3555] vs. [0.3559,0.3891]. If Kossin had stuck to the same number of significant figures as was originally used, then the confidence intervals would have overlapped and his results would not have been significant. Of course, this would have negated the primary claim of the paper and forced a full retraction. Ooops. To avoid that problem, Kossin added some extra digits, although it is hard to justify such a level of precision with the dataset that was used. Although I'm not much for statistics, it may be worse than that. I recalculated the confidence intervals for Kossin's correction and came up with different numbers. If I'm correct, then the CIs do in fact overlap and and the global results aren't (yet) significant for data up through 2017. See https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/34364/. This would mean that Kossin jumped the gun and claimed global statistical significance for his proportion a few years before the data will actually support that claim... Until the AMO switches to the cold phase and the Atlantic basin settles down.
Switching gears to the IPCC's claims wrt disaster losses for hurricanes wrt Grinsted et al 2019, I think it's significant that the IPCC refers to Kossin 2019. That paper found a significant decrease in TC translation speed in the CONUS over the last 120 years. It would seem that that IPCC was implying that slower-moving storms could be the physical cause of the supposed increased damage. Since the IPCC acknowledged that there has been no increase in the number of landfalling storms, it seems necessary to find some other plausible physical cause for Grinsted's claim of increased damage. On its face, slower moving storms could fit that bill -- e.g., slower moving storms subject coastal areas to winds and surges for longer periods of time and could lead to more damage. It seems to me that this was the point that the IPCC was trying to make, however ineptly. Perhaps the language was rather awkward because they couldn't make this claim too directly because it is utter conjecture. Perhaps the IPCC reasoned it was better to awkwardly offer an unsupported claim of a plausible physical cause for Grinsted's increased damage rather than have no physical cause at all. At any rate, even a casual investigation of Kossin 2019 shows that is doesn't help Grinsted's claim very much. The correlation between annual translation speed and Grinsted's ATD-normalized hurricane damage is quite poor.
Some of the years with highest normalized losses per Grinsted had higher-than-average translation speeds, and some of the years with very slow moving storms had very low losses. Moreover, the timing of the changes don't align well. Kossin 2019 shows a downward trend in speeds over the last 120 years only because storms were very fast in the 1920s and 1950s and then collapsed. Since reaching a low point in 1970, however, 10-year average translation speed has steadily increased over the last 50 years. Grinsted's "normalized" losses have increased most significantly over the last 40 years, when storms were regaining speed. Faster-moving storms, of course, cannot possibly the cause of the increased damage that Grinsted claimed to find. All of that to say that citing Kossin 2019 was a red herring, and Grinsted's alleged increase in normalized damage is left without a physical cause.
Apparently, I misspoke when I asked about forcings. What I really find confusing are feedback effects. Regarding feedback effects, I have seen suggestions ranging from that these are powerfully negative to claims that they don’t exist. Help! I could probably use a basic lesson in forcing versus feedback as well as whatever insight you can provide on the controversy regarding the effects of feedback. Thank you!
“Forcing” is how you take a likely 1c ECS for doubling co2, assuming even that number is real, and then saying that 1c will cause a bunch of other factors to accelerate and, yes of course, kill us all.
All you really need is the punchline
I was thinking of forcing in the sense of feedback effects that may flow from a change in CO2 and positively or negatively affect the climate. As I understand it (help me, Roger!), 'forcings' are how scientists derive some (or many?) of the effects CO2 is supposed to have on the climate. Happy to hear from anyone who can explain these forces to this non-scientist.
Hi Pamela, My dad’s next post is on ocean heat content. After that I’ll ask him to do forcings and feedbacks which is something he has written a lot about. Thanks!
David H. Jackson,MD Please:more simplification is needed for us who are simple-who are not climatologists-statisticians! I get your overall conclusions(I think) but a conclusion paragraph or two in simple language would be much appreciated. Otherwise I fear you are "preaching to the choir"! Last of all,it appears that Summaries for Policymakers(SPMs) and Synthesis Report are often in error so how can non-climatologists get accurate information? Are we to read the several thousand pages of AR6(which appear to be misleading as well)?
The several thousand pages of AR6 misleading as well. The fact that they are misleading is , however, obscured by attachment of unusual and deceptive meanings to statistical terms such that the axiom of probability theory and assumption of mathematical statistics called "unit measure" appears to be satisfied by the argument made by a climate model though in reality, "unit measure" is falsified by this argument. "Unit measure" is the proposition that "1 is the value of the measure of an event that is certain to occur." Under Aristotle's Laws of Thought, the value is 0, 1 or 2. That the value is 0 falsifies the Law of the Excluded Middle (LEM) and "unit measure." That the value is 2 falsifies the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC) and "unit measure." That the value is 1 satisfies the LEM, LNC and "unit measure." The argument made by the IPCC in AR6 can be proven to falsify the LEM and "unit measure." T
If they REALLY cared about emissions (hint: they don't), they would institute the Revenue Neutral Carbon Fee & Dividend. The CF&D penalizes the energy hog rich and rewards the energy frugal middle class & poor. While carbon trading grants government guaranteed giant profits for the wealthy. Really just another devious wealth transfer scheme from the Middle Class to the Rich. Very important, that you must also eliminate all the preferential subsidies, mandates and exemptions given to the political favorites wind & solar. They are favorites because they cost $trillions but do zip to reduce fossil consumption, apart from causing energy poverty --> reduced emissions. The Net Zero, carbon credits trading operation is just a giant greenwashing scam, almost entirely worthless:
EXPOSED: The Biggest Green SCAM In ESG | Breaking Points, Krystal breaks down the corporate scam of ESG and carbon offset programs in the USA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXxqjjgH0Ec&t=2s
Revealed: more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are worthless, analysis shows:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe
Newbie question here. I'm probably misunderstanding the concept but what I think I read was that there is no increase in damage associated with cyclones. If that's right it makes no sense when you consider that there has been a great deal of development in the last 100 years, especially in the tropics, and hence more stuff for cyclones to mess up, even if there is no change to the frequency of storms.
The increase in development is precisely the problem that needs to be addressed in order to compare disaster losses at different times. In order to make meaningful comparisons of disaster losses over time, it is necessary to normalize the data to remove any impact caused by increases in property value put in harms way through increased development. Dr. Pielke invented the standard methodology for normalizing disaster losses by adjusting for changes in wealth over time. Due to limitations in the availability of data a century ago, the conventional methodology uses population as a proxy for wealth. You can think of the normalization scheme as essentially adjusting disaster losses in current dollars (which are assumed to be 2x insured losses) by changes in population, per capita wealth, and inflation. After the loss data is normalized for those factors, then differences in losses between events in different years can be attributed to changes in the characteristics of the disasters that caused those losses. The conventional normalization process invented by Dr. Pielke adjusts for differences across time (or temporal differences). For example, consider the Great Miami hurricane. In 1926, that hurricane caused $105 million dollars of losses among the 117K people that lived in the affected area. The conventional normalization scheme determines what the current dollars losses would be if that same storm hit Miami now. If the Great Miami hurricane had made landfall in 2018, it would have caused $236 billion dollars losses among the 4.5 million people that live in the affected area in modern times. In that context, the $60 billion of losses from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 doesn't look quite so big. Enabling such context is precisely what normalization schemes that remove artificial changes (like changes in the value of property along the coastline) enables us to do.
Grinsted acknowledged that the conventional methodology is good at normalizing for differences of time, but he argued that this wasn't adequate. Grinsted et al's 2019 offered a novel methodology that was claims to adjust for both temporal differences and spatial differences. In other words, Grinsted argues that it isn't sufficient merely to adjust losses from the Great Miami hurricane for changes in wealth over time (e.g., 1926 vs 2018). Grinsted also claimed it is necessary to adjust losses by changes in wealth across different geographic locations (e.g., the city of Miami vs. some largely unsettled rural coast line). Grinsted offered a new methodology that was claimed to normalize for both temporal and spatial/location differences. Grinsted's results show a significant increase in normalized hurricane disaster losses. Dr. Pielke has heavily criticized Grinsted for using a hodge-podge corrupted dataset. It is also an outlier whose results are contradicted by numerous other studies of hurricane normalized losses. Furthermore, Grinsted's claim of increased normalized disaster losses isn't supported by trends in the attributes of hurricanes. Disaster losses are an effect, and every effect has a cause. If disaster losses are increasing, then there must be something about hurricanes that has likewise changed in order to produce the effect of increased losses. Hurricane data shows that the number of landfalling storms hasn't increased, and neither has the intensity of landfalling storms (e.g., "major hurricanes"). Other possible "causes" are sometimes conjectured in the literature, but none have stood up to criticism. For example, we all know that hurricanes drop in intensity quite rapidly after they make landfall. A 2020 paper (Li and Chakraborty) claimed that the intensity rate "decay" of hurricanes after landfall was slowing down such that storms were maintaining higher intensity as they moved inland, which the paper suggested could cause greater property losses. That claim did not hold up because the trend they claimed to see was caused solely by hurricanes that, after making landfall, turned back and passed over the ocean where they retained or increased their intensity. Of course, hurricanes that return to the sea, especially far out to sea, aren't doing damage to property on land. In the end, there is no characteristic of hurricanes that can account for an increasing trend in normalized losses. And without a plausible physical cause from a change in hurricanes, Grinsted's claim of increased losses must be spurious.
Roughly, I think it's no change per unit exposure. The dollar value of damage has increaed but the inflation adjusted value of exposure has increased as much or more so that the ratio is level or decreasing.
Great post. Once again, there is that mention of forcing, a concept that I still struggle to understand. Consider this a nudge not to leave us hanging with a lack of understanding of what forcings are, written in your wonderfully clear style. And I have one more item to add to my ever-growing list of questions: is there really such a thing as global climate and, if so, why does it matter if the effects are local and "global" just means the averaging of a lot of local numbers?
In a recent paper Roger made available for us to read he quotes the IPCC as defining radiative forcing as “the change in the net, downward minus upward, radiative flux (expressed in Watts per square meter; W/m2 ) at the tropopause or top of atmosphere due to a change in an external driver of climate change, such as, for example, a change in the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) or the output of the Sun.” I wonder, what's an internal driver of climate change?
I absolutely love your approach. Thank you so much for your fact based analysis. It is so refreshing.
I am with Mark here. I once worked in a government management lab that did QA/QC on our lab work. An academic doing related work did not. Sh said her research budget did not allow for it. I told her I wouldn’t be allowing research without QA/QC to influence our management. Of course it ultimately did, but should it have?
Let’s dream of an optimal IPCC .. 1. Pay people to work on it so they are sure to be careful. 2. Assign responsibility and accountability for sections to specific individuals. 3. Have formal reviewed QA/QC processes. 4. Allow scientists outside the group to review the draft in an open forum.5. If disputes arise, keep a third party panel in place to resolve them, and make the discussions of that group transparent.
Roger, about a year or so ago I commented that the IPCC process for developing the SPM's was hopelessly politicized and biased and that whatever "good science" that was being done was subject to misrepresentation and exploitation by this process. You replied back to me that you didn't pay much attention to the SPM's (I think you even said that you didn't read them). Unfortunately I am unable to find my comment and your response. As a big part of the problems you are discussing here are associated with the SPM's, it appears that you may have reevaluated your position.
In addition, to call out the IPCC for having quality control problems, while true, misses the larger problem afflicting the IPCC and in fact the entire UN.
The problems with the IPCC go way beyond mere quality control. I assume that you know the difference between QC (Quality Control) and QA (Quality Assurance). I am not a QA/QC expert but as a reminder I offer the following: "Quality assurance is a process based approach while quality control is a product based approach. Quality assurance involves processes managing quality, and quality control is used to verify the quality of the product. Quality audit is an example of quality assurance."
Does the IPCC have a QA plan including objectives, procedures, audits etc.? I doubt it. If I am wrong please point me to it. It is typical in any modern significant undertaking such as software development, engineering and construction of buildings, bridges, pipelines, offshore platforms etc. to have such a plan. In fact, it is virtually impossible in today's world to undertake a major project without one. Simplistically, QC procedures are typically mandated by the QA plan and must meet objectives of the QA plan.
While both of the issues you discuss in today's post are examples of sloppy checking, writing and editing which fall under the rubric of QC, the problems go way beyond simply sloppy work and checking.
In the first case "cherry picking", were the authors truly not familiar with the relevant literature, did they not know of your work. Did they make honest mistakes that should have been picked up by straight forward peer review? Why were you not asked to review this work? I think the answers to these questions are obvious.
In the second example on TC trends you do a yeoman's job of digging through which report says what etc. However calling the mischaracterization at the higher levels an oversight is like saying that an IRS agent showing up at Matt Taibbi's house on the day he testified before Congress is just a coincidence. Let's back off from all of the digging through reports to find who said what when. I think the main question is when there is "low confidence" in something like TC trends why does the IPCC highlight it in the most alarmist way possible? Should "findings" that they have low confidence in even be distinguished from the inverse trend? How man low confidence "findings" that go against the preferred UN narrative can you find? I think that all of us here know the answers to these questions.
Improving QC (checking) will not solve IPCC's problems and they'll never write a QA plan because it would have to be so obviously biased and political.
I'm from a construction background (32yrs+) and I agree that all projects have QA and QC procedures, but they don't guarantee a quality output. They do help mitigate against many quality issues though. I think the IPCC is so politicised now that implementation of such wouldn't make any difference - Roger shows perfectly in this and last weeks article that cherry picking data is wholly acceptable so long as it supports the orthodoxy. They are so far down their (catastrophe) rabbit hole that I can't see them ever emerging with something that reality. The worrying thing is how many people quote the IPCC and it's predictions of catastrophes with impunity. It take people like Roger to dig through the data to disprove them, but often the damage is already done.
Agreed. My issue is that calling it a QC problem implies a (readily fixable)lack of routine checking. As you say, the problem is much deeper. It involves politicization, not surprising when it comes to the UN, but of Science as well. It also involves the lack of integrity of the scientists and analysts that participate in the IPCC who keep quiet when their work is misrepresented or distorted in the name of the UN's overriding catastrophe narrative.
I think Roger does yeoman's work pointing out errors and distortions in the IPCC's work. However his insistence that the IPCC is indispensable and that it just needs a few tweaks here and there is naive and understates the nature and severity of the problem.
Agreed - I too think the IPCC should be razed to the ground. I suspect Roger is saying it his way so he can he and keep some constructive dialogue with them. Any objective assessment of the IPCC must surely conclude it is politicised and biased in favour of catastrophe. Check out John Dodders on Twitter for a thread which shows some of the more ridiculous predictions (it made me smile)...
https://twitter.com/dodders75/status/1613963804685266944?t=-4Y0Lzgxg8gUYrjG9B_7_Q&s=19
I understand, but if Roger doesn't yet understand that you just can't walk a fine line with these fanatics I'm afraid he never will. Look what they've already done to him, the Grejalva stuff, not seeking his review of the material that is clearly in his wheel house, banishing him to a windowless basement office, etc. Look at what they have done to Judith Curry, and Bjorn Lomborg is totally persona non grata. Look what they are doing to Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger.
Once again my head is spinning because of my lack of education in climate science. While the details of your takedown of IPCC are confusing, your conclusion is crystal clear. I'm working on finding a way to express these propagandist reports from IPCC for any letters to the editors, etc. that I may decide to try to write.
In particular, I really like the last quotation offered below by Jerome Ravetz: "... If you simply go to history with a thesis and you look up the documents to try to prove it, then you are not really being a historian, you are being a propagandist "
Climate "science" is actually a pseudoscience that is dressed up to look like a science by an application of the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness by the argument that is made by a climate model. Under this application of this fallacy, an "abstract" event of the future for Earth's climate system is mistaken for a "concrete" event of the future where an "abstract" event of the future is "abstracted" (removed) from a location in space and time but a "concrete" event of the future has such a location. A collection of "concrete" events of the future is an example of a statistical population but a collection of "abstract" events of the future is not. Conequently the argument made by a climate model lacks the empirical support of a statistical population but is dressed up to look like it has this support.