Yes, it’s true. The forthcoming IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5C has been formally accused of ‘pulling its punches’ in order to let polluters off the hook by none other than Bob Ward, policy wonk at the Grantham Institute. The Graun, of course, has the story.
Warnings about the dangers of global warming are being watered down in the final version of a key climate report for a major international meeting next month, according to reviewers who have studied earlier versions of the report and its summary.
They say scientists working on the final draft of the summary are censoring their own warnings and “pulling their punches” to make policy recommendations seem more palatable to countries – such as the US, Saudi Arabia and Australia – that are reluctant to cut fossil-fuel emissions, a key cause of global warming. “Downplaying the worst impacts of climate change has led the scientific authors to omit crucial information from the summary for policymakers,” said one reviewer, Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
OMG, they left out the really bad bits! The tail end high risk scenarios beloved of climate catastrophists the world over. The highly implausible but theoretically possible scenarios which alarmists have for years relied upon to drive their regressive energy and transport policies like a sustainable coach and horses through legislative obstacles.
Bob obligingly confirms:
“However, if governments do not recognise the full scale and urgency of the risks, they may underestimate how critical it is to meet the goal of the Paris agreement on climate change. And that could have very serious knock-on effects in the battle to limit the impact of global warming.”
So what did they leave out? According to the Graun, the following:
- Any mention that temperature rises of above 1.5C could lead to increased migrations and conflict;
- All discussion of the danger of the Gulf Stream being disrupted by cold water flowing from the Arctic where more and more sea-ice is melting;
- Warnings about the dangers that 1.5–2C temperature rises could trigger irreversible loss of the Greenland ice sheet and raise sea levels by 1–2 metres over the next two centuries.
But . . . . muh climate refugees and climate change wars, muh Gulf Stream collapse, muh disappearing Greenland and and muh Deluge! ‘Science’ says all this can happen with another half degree temperature rise! To add to the amusement, the author seems to think that melting sea-ice (frozen salt water) will contribute to a slowing of the Gulf Stream, when it is in fact melting fresh water from Greenland glaciers which could conceivably dilute salty Arctic waters sufficiently to slow down the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation.
Scientists who actually contribute to IPCC reports do disagree with Ward however, even Peter Stott and Piers Forster:
Bob’s looking pretty stupid and out on a limb here. Nothing much new then.
“highly implausible but theoretically possible scenarios”
Disputed. The OTT high risk scenarios are _lies_. Authors cherry pick from uncertain data and less certain science to get those high risk scenarios. There’s no conscience guiding them to pick actually possible scenarios. Not their own, not their critics’ conscience. They’re motivated to raise awareness. Their high risk scenarios are not “theoretically possible”.
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Mark, I was perhaps being a little generous, but working on the assumption that, where systemic uncertainties are very large, theory allows for highly implausible scenarios. For example, it is theoretically possible that if Greenland melted quite suddenly over a relatively brief period of several decades or a century, the freshwater influx to the North Atlantic could very seriously disrupt the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or even shut it down completely. It’s likely happened before in the early Holocene. The ‘Hothouse Earth’ scenario is a theoretical possibility (according to currently accepted theory), but is extremely implausible, reliant as it is upon high climate sensitivity to CO2, coupled with a cascade of very uncertain positive feedbacks.
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A synonym for “alarmist” is “deceitful” as the term has come to be played out in the real world of climate alarmism.
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Richard Betts is very cross with Bob.
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Oopsy.
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This is too funny. Notice that Bob dropped himself in it.
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Oh dear, it does rather look like Bob is busy digging himself an even deeper hole.
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‘re last para Sea ice is fresh water even when made from salt water. The N.a. and. Cl ions are excluded from the ice matrix.
Don’t make daft mistakes. It only encourages the alarmist loonies who would like to have a monopoly on silly mistakes
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It has always been hard to understand the intransigence of the climate establishment. In the case of Bob, it may simply be that he is dim.
In that respect, he always surprises.
Not unlike…
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Bob is annoying all the right people.
Keep up the good work, Bob!
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Alarmoholics know most people haven’t got the stamina or even interest to plough through the whole report, so if it’s not in the summary it’s not reaching much of the audience.
Re. earlier IPCC reports it’s been claimed that parts of the summary were more alarmist than the main report, so this sounds like a small step in the right direction.
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Ben, that is one very bizarre conversation. Ward admits to being a reviewer of earlier drafts. He denies being a reviewer of the FGD, but that is entirely beside the point, as the FGD has been leaked. Bob saw earlier drafts as a reviewer. He has obviously seen the final draft and it is obviously him who is saying that things which were in the earlier drafts have been left out of the final draft. So he has broken the confidentiality agreement which he must have signed as a reviewer of earlier drafts.by talking about their content now in relation to the final draft. Bang to rights Bob, I’m afraid.
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Pingback: Climate alarmists accuse IPCC of ‘watering down’ disaster predictions (again) | Tallbloke's Talkshop
Alastair,
“don’t make daft mistakes”.
1. New sea-ice contains significant amounts of salt.
2. The salt leaches out as the years go by so multi-year ice is largely free of salt.
3. The salt budget of the northern oceans is overall unaffected by the freezing and melting of sea-ice.
4. Melting of even the oldest (decades old), thickest sea-ice, with the subsequent release of freshwater into the ocean is unlikely to affect the stability of the AMOC.
5. A massive release of ancient freshwater from the Greenland ice sheets will probably affect AMOC.
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Since the summary report is going to be (science) fiction again, does this “news” really matter?
Ward is a known w@nker, have we really learned anything new about him?
Do we really believe the final draft will be watered down so as not to upset Saudi or the USA? Has it ever been before?
Dissension in the ranks? This might be the only real news.
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Alan, I think the significant things are, as raised in the thread about fabricated news and the Global Commission report, and as per your point about dissension, it seems to be the case that alarmists are increasingly having to fall back on speculative hypotheses such as attribution to make their claims.
Ward is as you describe him. And he’s a fool. But he also knows what Stern et al expect, and his job is to marshal the press accordingly, and it looks like they are going to be disappointed by the report.
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A familiar trope of alarmists is to claim that IPCC reports are ‘too conservative’. This pops up at the end of one of the threads, in which a green investor takes issue with Betts.
It was also the claim of Lewandowsky/Oreskes et al, who claimed that IPCC scientists had been contaminated by the deniers’ “pause meme”.
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Ben do you mean that Stern et al. or the marshalled press will be disappointed by the report? I suspect both might be. Betts certainly hasn’t made Bob’s herding task any easier. Them pesky scientists are getting more and more like cats each report cycle – soon they’ll be talking natural variation and be out of control.
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from the Guardian link – “They say scientists working on the final draft of the summary are censoring their own warnings and “pulling their punches” to make policy recommendations seem more palatable to countries – such as the US, Saudi Arabia and Australia – that are reluctant to cut fossil-fuel emissions, a key cause of global warming”
Apart from the strange naming of only 3 nations (China/Germany maybe) mentioned as being “reluctant to cut fossil-fuel emissions”
Thought the USA was pulling out of “the Paris agreement” ?
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Mark McCarthy @markpmcc wrote, “The IPCC has a rigorous review process.”
Well, that’s a welcome change, if true. The AR5 review process was a sham.
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ps – love the top “Order by recommendations” posts at the G
“bluekim 14h ago
The truth is the truth. Facts are facts. They must be faced regardless of these nations’ posssible reactions. They should be spelled out word for word or it’s pointless. This is not a time for cowardice. Every word left out of this report is a betrayal of science and of this planet.”
Tirrilian 14h ago
Appeasing the enemies of mankind never makes sense, even if they are called the US, Saudi Arabia and Australia.
OMG
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Sunday roast?
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“You’re just picking on me!”
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But I thought the science was settled. How can there be such disagreement between the scientists?
And I thought the IPCC reports were about science, not politics. How come it’s all suddenly so political?
If Bob disagrees with the latest IPCC summary, does that mean he’s a denier?
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An exercise for the reader. When reading such materials, replace climate
change/global warming with Santa Claus. It’s equally convincing yet even
children stop believing in Santa Claus.
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Bob Ward’s Santa, Sir Grantham, has made it clear that Bob’ s income very much depends on how vigorously Bob defends climate extremism and silences those who are insufficiently extremist.
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A day after this nonsense was dismissed by several climate scientists, the idiots at Grantham are still trying to push it:
It occurred to me that maybe Bob himself was behind Grantham’s tweets, in which case “idiots” (plural) would be incorrect, but apparently the tweets come from someone called Merlin Sibley.
Their twitter home page claims “Rigour and Independence”, LOL.
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Santa Claus is a climate change denier of the worst sort. He gives naughty children fossil fuel (coal) instead of toys.
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Wow. Bob is really doubling down on the pathological-lack-of-self-awareness.
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The Guardian is so desperate to prove that ‘climate refugees’ are a reality that it is inventing them.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-change/2018/sep/24/all
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Jaime. One of those so-called “climate refugees” comes from Isle de Jean Charles. It and other similar islands from Louisiana are textbook examples of what happens to the sediment laid down by a distributary once the delta switches. With no water bringing new sediment, the sediment pile begins to subside and is attacked by the sea. The result is the drowning of the delta lobe with remnants preserved as narrow barrier islands. These are continuously attacked by the waves and eventually disappear (without any sealevel change necessary). The Louisiana islands are not, repeat not victims of climate change, but of natural subsidence and wave attack. Everyone knows this, it’s in all physical geography textbooks.
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Indeed. Thanks Alan. The island apparently sank 3ft during the 20th Century and sea level rose . . . . 6.5 inches! But people fleeing the encroaching sea are still “climate refugees”. The deliberate deception is both breathtaking and appalling. Climate alarmists make snake oil salesmen look like respectable entrepreneurs.
https://thelensnola.org/2016/12/06/the-people-of-isle-de-jean-charles-arent-the-countrys-first-climate-refugees/
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Alan Dendal, you don’t even have to wait for the delta river path to switch, if you build dams upstream and prevent the floods that used to carry silt down to the delta. When that process has been going on for thousands of years, the result is a steady subsidence, as the crust of the Earth sinks under the burden of all that dirt (isostatic adjustment). When the silt-bearing floods stop coming, because of the dams, and the subsidence continues, you get this:
http://www.sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=Grand+Isle&g_date=1940/1-2019/12&c_date=1940/1-2019/12&s_date=1940/1-2019/12
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bit o/t
but see Dana at the G likes – New study reconciles a dispute about how fast global warming will happen.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/sep/24/new-study-reconciles-a-dispute-about-how-fast-global-warming-will-happen#comment-120809829
Dana Nuccitelli comments –
“I find it curious that ‘contrarian’ climate scientists come up with low end warming after they have declared their scepticism. Perhaps they had a gut feeling and it was bourn out by further study.
To be fair, Otto (legit mainstream climate scientist) was a lead author on one such study (Lewis was a co-author). The energy balance model approach is a valid way of trying to figure out climate sensitivity. It just turns out to have some flaws that bias its results, or at least make it a transient (short-term) estimate rather than equilibrium (long-term) estimate. Basically, Lewis stumbled onto an approach that happened to be biased in his preferred direction.
I alos find it curious that contrarian scientists [and alarmist ones] throw out the basis of the scientific method- that is you cannot pick and choose which evidence you want and what you don’t want.
Confirmation bias is very powerful.”
The source article is from –
Earth’s Future is a transdisciplinary, Gold Open Access journal examining the state of the planet and its inhabitants, sustainable and resilient societies, the science of the Anthropocene, and predictions of our common future through research articles, reviews and commentaries”
as usual Dana Spins it without any “Confirmation bias”
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The real issue for the IPCC here is to balance what can be promoted as consensus “science” and the need to give political credence to climate mitigation policies to constrain warming to a given temperature rise.
In AR5, they could barely justify 2°C of warming constraint. It would appear they needed to assume (a) ECS = 3.00, (b) achievement of full ECS takes at least half a century, (c) CO2 emissions need only be considered as the warming impact of other GHGs (Methane, Nitrous Oxide etc) was offset by the vaguely estimated impact of aerosols and precursors. It then it was not to ultimately constrain warming to 2°C above the levels in 1850, but to have a better than evens chance (given the assumptions) of stopping warming exceeding 2°C in 2100. Using the results of AR5 Synthesis Report, the UNEP Emissions GAP Report 2014 (pdf) has following emissions pathways in Figure ES.1
The more realistic scenario is upper one, with emissions only peaking in 2030. The aggregate impact of all the emissions pledges within the Paris Agreement will not stop emissions rising through to 2030. Yet this requires negative emissions from around 2070. 1.5°C of warming has about 630 GtCO2 of net emissions by the end of the century from 2011. With around 35 GtCO2 of emissions per annum, that it greater than 700 GtCO2 of extra emissions by 2030. So to prevent 1.5°C of aggregate negative emissions must be significantly greater than the positive emissions post 2030. This is contingent on assumptions which are collectively untenable.
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dfhunter,
What Nutticelli fails to mention is that Goodwin’s study itself relies upon an energy balance approach!
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Now, even the climate propagandists at Climate Home are sticking the boot into Bob:
Climate scientists reject ‘offensive’ claim of US, Saudi meddling in landmark report
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Ouch!
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Oops, Bob’s really gone and done it now. He’s accused IPCC scientists of being fossil fuel shills! I’ve paged Lew to ask if he will be doing a new study on this new breed of climate alarmist ideational conspiracist science deniers.
Richard is visibly now very irritated by him and probably speaks for many other scientists. Bob has blown it. He has few friends now on either side of the debate.
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As a non user of social media I miss the finer points ( and sometimes the massifs) of current controversies. Is anyone rash enough to support Bob? Or is he a lone Don Quixote tilting at IPPC windmills? I do so hope it’s the latter.
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“Is anyone rash enough to support Bob?”
Nope. Not this time.
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Oops. How rash of me…
“Anyone” above does not include grown men who claim to be scientists with insight into the most urgent issue that mankind has ever faced, but who assume the identity of a rabbit that refers to itself in the third person.
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Ha, Jaime thinks Eli gives Leporids a bad name; Jaime thinks Eli is more Rodent. Jaime blocked Eli a year ago for trolling!
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Not just Eli. Kevin Anderson too:
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Okay, So we are all agreed then, from the Bob to the anti-Bob. The IPCC is not fit for purpose.
Now what do we do?
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BS has joined the rabbit and the end-is-nigh merchant, and declared himself a Retwardian.
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I’m sure Brandon’s intervention on Twitter has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with his grievance with Ben and with Cliscep for ‘banning’ him and the fact that this Cliscep article, critical of Ward and broadly supportive of Betts, is doing the rounds, having gained the attention of the GWPF. I’m sure it’s just his famous nose sniffing out something ‘not quite right’ in the way Bob has been universally chastised by the scientists whose credibility and personal integrity he so publicly brought into question. I’m sure I can’t hear the sound of a grinding axe.
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Not having had time to read all the great comments on here (I am 76 and my time is limited), I believe this stupid report is being rushed out to influence the so called mid term elections in the US of A
Far from being luke warm, I expect the “scientific findings” to be geared to embarrassing my friend President Trump and persuade the sheeple to vote socialist because its worse than we thought.
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In a way, Bob Ward is right. This report was commissioned by the UNFCCC in the Adoption of the Paris Agreement paper on 12 December 2015. Specifically it was in Paragraphs 17 and 21, reproduced below.
Paragraph 17 states the failure of the Paris Agreement. Through to 2030 emissions will still be climbing, yet the 2C of warming pathway required a 25% emissions reduction. As true climate alarmists they thought that if they could get
a gagglesome of the world’s leading scientists to produce some scary scenarios. There turned out to be two problems with this.By looking at the impacts of an incremental in average global temperature increase going forward that is similar to the increase in the last forty years there is not a lot to go on. Paul’s article “The Myth of the Climate Crisis” published today looks at Roger Pielke Jnr’s revised book that finds no real evidence of an emerging problem, so it is pretty difficult to claim a further 1.5C will somehow be a tipping point.
Second, the idea of emissions reductions will be a pretty hard sell for two groups of countries. There are the “developing” countries. I put this in italics as it is a pretty diverse group of countries, with 80%+ of the global population and about 65% of GHG emissions. After China has shown, and India is showing, that high levels of economic growth are at least partly achieved by rapid development of cheap fossil fuels, other countries want a bit of the action. Then there are the economies deeply dependent on exporting of fossil fuels. The United States might be now the largest producer of fossil fuels, but Russia and Saudi Arabia are not far behind. But in nominal GDP the US economy is about 12 times that of Russia and 28 times that of Saudi Arabia. Other highly dependent countries are Kuwait, Iran, Iraq & Turkmenistan.
For countries in either group to seriously consider abandoning their economic prosperity there has to be some pretty scary and highly credible stories. Even if they swallowed such stories whole, what would be the use in a nation self-harming when the vast majority of the benefits to their nation are from other nations self-harming?
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Over at BS’s blog, BS is valiantly defending Bob Ward’s honor against Richard Betts’ vicious attacks.
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I sometimes think Brandon is mad and enjoys arguing with himself. There is just no point at all in writing what he did. I can’t see what he is trying to prove. Ward admitted to being a reviewer of the SOD, but not the FGD, which was apparently ‘leaked’ by persons unknown, therefore seen by Ward. He used his knowledge of what was in the SOD to compare its contents with what was in the leaked FGD to claim that bits had been left out, which he then attributed to a conspiracy on the part of the scientific authors involved. By sharing his knowledge of what was in the SOD with the press, he therefore breached the confidentiality agreement which he must have signed as a reviewer. Therefore Betts’ accusation of impropriety (which did not specifically mention Ward, but realistically could not be construed to apply to anybody else) was accurate. End of story. Move on please Mr Schollenberger, for heaven’s sake.
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