The IPCC’s Perversion Of Science
The IPCC’s heralded Synthesis Report is supposed to accurately synthesize the best information about human beings’ climate impacts in order to rationally guide policy. Instead, it severely distorts science to advance a corrupt political agenda
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently published, to great fanfare, its “Synthesis Report” (SR)—the culmination of its lengthy 6th “Assessment Cycle” of reports on various aspects of human being’s climate impacts and their implications for policy. 1
The Synthesis Report is supposed to accurately synthesize the best info about human climate impacts—including the threats of dangerous temps, storms, floods, etc—to rationally guide policy, above all what to do about ‘fossil fuels’.
Because of the Synthesis Report’s prestige, the world took it very seriously when they heard about its dire claims. E.g., UN Chief Antonio Guterres saying we can’t have a “liveable future” if we don’t take “urgent climate action”—above all, rapidly eliminating fossil fuel use. 2
Even skeptics of the IPCC Report’s drastic calls for rapidly eliminating fossil fuels—often via means that give enormous power and money to favored politicians—may feel uncomfortable questioning a “scientific” Report.
But a common-sense reading reveals that it’s total garbage.
A proper climate synthesis report must cover two key issues:
1. An evenhanded (covering minuses and pluses) and precise account of our climate impacts.
2. An account of our ability to master climate danger, including the use of ‘fossil fuels’ to neutralize its own negative climate impacts.
- An evenhanded and precise account of our climate impacts.
With rising greenhouse gasses we must consider both negatives (e.g., more heat waves) and positives (e.g., fewer cold deaths, global greening from CO2). And we must be precise, not equating some climate impact with a huge impact.
- An account of our ability to master climate danger.
Any valid climate synthesis must account for climate mastery, because the same ‘fossil fuels’ that impact climate can also neutralize negatives—e.g., via ‘fossil-fueled‘ air conditioning to alleviate heat and irrigation to alleviate drought.
You don’t need to be a scientist to know that a proper climate synthesis report should include both an evenhanded and precise account of our climate impacts and an account of our ability to master climate danger.
And if you read the IPCC Synthesis Report, it’s obvious it fails at both.
I recommend just skimming the IPCC Synthesis Report, linked below—this report that is supposed to be so brilliant—and just ask yourself if it is remotely evenhanded about human impact on climate, or if it accounts for our mastery of climate.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_SYR_LongerReport.pdf
Instead of an evenhanded and precise account of our climate impacts, the IPCC SR gives us a blatantly biased view of exaggerated negative impacts, with no mention of positives like global greening thanks to CO2 fertilization of the atmosphere or decreasing cold-related deaths.
Instead of accounting for our climate mastery ability, the IPCC SR ignores our ability to neutralize negative climate impacts, despite the fact that we’ve driven climate disaster deaths down by 98% over the last century!
This is like a polio report omitting the polio vaccine. 3
By exaggerating our negative climate impacts and ignoring our ability to master climate danger, the IPCC Synthesis perpetrates a 3-part perversion of science:
“A: Current Status and Trends”
“B: Long-Term Climate and Development Futures”
“C: Near-Term Responses in a Changing Climate”
“A: Current Status and Trends” distorts the present state of climate danger
“B: Future Climate Change, Risks, and Long-Term Responses” distorts the evidence about future climate danger
“C: Responses in the Near Term” calls for huge power and money for an anti-‘fossil-fuel‘ agenda
The IPCC’s “Synthesis Report” has been criticized intelligently by various experts, including Roger Pielke and Patrick Brown.
But this isn’t enough. All experts in the field should unequivocally condemn this dangerous piece of garbage and the process that produced it. 4
How the IPCC severely distorts the present state of climate danger:
By exaggerating negative impacts and ignoring climate mastery, the IPCC portrays the world as suffering “widespread adverse impacts… and related losses and damages” when climate danger is lower than ever!
Any honest “Current Status and Trends” report on climate would start by acknowledging that any negative climate changes so far have been far outweighed by our increasing climate mastery ability, which led to plummeting climate deaths thanks to our ‘fossil fuel‘-powered technology. 5
Insofar as a climate report addresses the overall state of the world, it should acknowledge that human life has never been better. E.g., extreme poverty (~$2/day) plummeted from 42 percent in 1980 to <10 percent today. And it should recognize ‘fossil-fueled’ industrialization as a root cause. 6
The IPCC’s “Current Status and Trends” 100 percent falsely portrays ‘fossil fuels‘ as making climate, and life, worse than ever, even though they’ve made both better: “Climate change has adversely affected human physical health globally… and is contributing to humanitarian crises.”
Any honest “Current Status and Trends” on climate would also acknowledge the reducing level of economic losses from climate—vs. an expected catastrophic increase–despite the increasing accumulation of wealth in disaster-prone spots like coastal areas. 7
Instead of acknowledging flat or declining climate damages, the IPCC portrays things as worse than ever: “Individual livelihoods have been affected through, for example, destruction of homes and infrastructure, and loss of property and income, human health and food security.”
Any honest “Current Status and Trends” report should acknowledge that while everyone has become safer from climate, the most developed countries are safest.
And thus the path to increasing safety is more development, which will largely require more ‘fossil fuels‘ for the foreseeable future. 8
See more here climatechangedispatch
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Trackback from your site.
Bevan
| #
“How the IPCC severely distorts the present state of climate danger:” – more than ‘severely distorts’, their claim is a blatant un-truth. They say the danger arises from the use of fossil fuel causing global warming due to it emitting CO2 gas into the atmosphere. In fact CO2 does not generate any heat energy whatsoever so it cannot raise the temperature of anything. It merely passes on the heat in the local environment, from hotter to colder, via conduction, convection and radiation, as does everything in endeavoring to achieve a state of temperature equilibrium. The later never being reached due to the Earth’s rotation about its axis and its orbit around the Sun.
Reply
Tom Anderson
| #
Alex Epstein: I applaud your incisive criticism of what is no more than alarmist hyperbole. There are well-researched features of fossil-fuel use seldom if ever raised in debate.
In 1971 two NASA scientists investigated whether burning fossil fuels to produce more CO2 could stave off an perceived “ice age” threat. They concluded, no. First, any warming by CO2 would be offset by the more familiar product of burning fossil-fuel, smoke and airborne soot – aerosols. Aerosols cool the atmosphere by screening out sunlight, reflecting solar energy back to space, and providing nucleides for water vapor to condense on to make cooling clouds. Second, steady aerosol increase would soon exceed the gas’s gradual saturation level. They advised against using fossil fuels to warm the planet because they were “atmospheric coolants.” They still are. (Rasool, S.I., and S. H. Schneider, “Atmospheric carbon dioxide and aerosols effects of large increases on global climate,” Science, July 1971, Vol. 173, pp. 138-141, p. 139.)
It is also well recorded (six experiments – omitted here) that CO2 concentrations uniformly follow changed temperature by months and are more likely an effect, not cause, of the change.
As an infrared-radiation active gas, carbon dioxide radiates only at spectral bands resonant with its quantum number, the major band (99% + ) occurring at 15 microns wavelength with a temperature of 193K or minus 80 degrees Celsius, that is, -80C and -112F.
Also, CO2 is among the atmospheric gases that radiate incoming solar energy away to space with the Earth’ outgoing energy. This is visible in satellite images.
The final touch is that a greener planet from CO2 fertilization is a cooler planet.
It is a pity these observations are not better known.
Reply
Tom Anderson
| #
“Earth’s” energy.
Reply