The New IPCC Climate Report – More of the Same Hot Air, with Extra Alarmism Added; Facts Missing

Topping the news today for many media outlets is the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report titled: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability

Although news outlets are going into overdrive with coverage as the screencap from Google News below shows, the truth is the report is long on speculation and short on facts. What facts exist, refute the alarming claims made in the report.

The report’s authors attempt to link all sorts of weather disasters to human caused climate change. For example, the final sentence of new IPCC report paints a picture of doom:

“The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human well-being and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.”

The IPCC portrays the present as a “last chance” but in fact, as explored in previous Climate Realism posts, there have been many proclaimed last chances before that have come and gone.

The fundamental problem with this report is it presents no hard, factual evidence to support the claim that the climate is worsening faster than expected, just future projections from computer models. An even bigger problem is the IPCC is relying on climate models that have been discredited in the scientific literature, such as RCP8.5.

Climate Realism previously reported that two scientific papers demonstrated that RCP8.5 future climate scenarios can’t occur. There simply isn’t enough fossil fuel in existence on the planet to make it happen.

But the IPCC used them anyway, probably because they needed to maintain the scary scenarios to spur action. Dr. Richard Tol sums the problem up nicely:

The IPCCC chose to ignore the literature that said the future climate isn’t as bad as the worst-case model predicts, and create a future that is full of doom and gloom unless we “act now.”

Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. points out that this is something they’ve been doing for years as a matter of practice:

One thing I do not understand

As extreme climate scenarios have become discredited over the past 5+ years, both IPCC WGs 1 and 2 chose to increase their emphasis on them

This is not good for the credibility and legitimacy of IPCC assessments, which are very important pic.twitter.com/p1KFsh1Y5v

— Roger Pielke Jr.🇺🇦 (@RogerPielkeJr) February 28, 2022

The biggest credibility-destroying factor of the IPCC report? Their claim that climate determines how humans live and progress. They ignore the fact that history shows humans are adaptable, human societies are resilient, and that humans often take a particular climate and shape it to our use in ways that limit the impact climate change has on peoples’ lives and lifestyles. The reality is that over time, humans have developed technologies to take advantage of the climate that exists, and to overcome changes in climate and weather extreme, in pursuit of human wellbeing. This report ignores this fact, instead portraying peoples and nations as living solely at the whims of nature, having no ability to minimize the climate’s effect on us or respond to weather extremes or changing climate conditions. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As we have reported before on Climate Realism, we live in a time where humans have prospered, and the threat of death from severe weather events is diminishing and approaching zero. The world is actually getting greener, and crop production is up worldwide.

Yet, the IPCC considers none of this.

A post by Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. on Twitter perhaps sums up the problems with the IPCC’s newest report best:

Bizarro world, indeed.

We’ll have more on this report in the coming days, but for now, ignore the media hype and rest easy. The future climate boogeyman is just that, a figment of imagination and bad computer models.