The political role played by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in fomenting climate and ecological panic to push through a collectivist Net Zero project is starting to attract general and widespread sceptical debate. In recent years, every IPCC climate utterance has sought to ramp up alarm and push the unproven hypothesis that humans are causing the climate to heat up by burning fossil fuel. The recently published Synthesis Report, which compiles IPCC findings from the last five years, was full of extreme projections, most of them produced by computer models. The distinguished climatologist Dr. Judith Curry is unimpressed and notes that UN climate panic “is more politics than science”.
It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the current climate narrative is firmly embedded in most mainstream scientific models, as well as the Net Zero business plan. As Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen is fond of noting, the current climate narrative is “absurd”, but trillions of dollars says it’s not absurd. Curry notes that the IPCC reports have become “bumper sticker” climate science – “making a political statement, while using the overall reputation of science to give authority to a politically manufactured consensus”.
In addition, as the Daily Sceptic noted last week, the IPCC is rapidly descending into wokedom. The Daily Caller counted 31 variations of the words ‘equity’ and ‘inequality’ in the 36-page Synthesis Report. Variations of ‘inclusive’ and ‘inclusion’ appear 17 times, and there are mentions of colonialism and social justice. A recent set of published minutes for a major IPCC meeting last October was liberally sprinkled with the need to solicit ‘scientific’ input based on identity, gender and age.
Curry notes that the IPCC reports include some good material, but the accompanying Summary for Policymakers (SPM) for the Synthesis “emphasises weakly justified findings on climate impacts driven by extreme emission scenarios, and politicised policy recommendations on emissions reductions”.
What has happened is quite simple to understand. Global warming has run out of steam, while a 40-year climate model history of over-predicting temperature rises is becoming increasingly embarrassing. As a result, extreme carbon dioxide emission scenarios are no longer justified. Curry reports that scenarios known as RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 which forecast global rises of 4-5°C degrees within less than 80 years have been quietly dropped. They are now “recognised as implausible”. But most of the extreme responses – as well as the pulpit fulminations from hysterics such as Al ‘Rain Bombs’ Gore and UN Secretary-General Antonio ‘Highway to Climate Hell’ Guterres – are based on these predictions.
Both scenarios have been removed from the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Climate Agreement, but, notes Curry, the new Synthesis Report continues to emphasise these extreme scenarios, while burying in a footnote the caveat that “very high emission scenarios have become less likely but cannot be ruled out”. The reduction in temperature projections is huge since it cuts the figure by two thirds. “Rejecting these extreme scenarios has rendered obsolete much of the climate literature and assessments of the past decade,” concludes Curry.
Read More: The IPCC is Promoting a Left-Wing Political Agenda Masquerading as ‘Science