Today the Royal Society publishes its report on resilience to extreme weather events and it's a bundle of laughs. I confess I haven't read the whole thing - it was only sent to me late last night - and you will see why I didn't want to persevere.
As ever with these things it's good to start at the back, where we learn that the project was funded, among others, by Jeremy Grantham. (I wonder who approached whom?). The list of those consulted was also interesting, including familiar names such as:
Also prominent among the list of contributors are several environmental groups, such as:
I focused my reading on the science section rather than the "what shall we do" sections. In it I learned that the authors decided they would base all their projections on the IPCC's RCP8.5 concentration pathway for carbon dioxide. In other words, the one with the highest carbon dioxide concentrations. You could have knocked me down with a feather when I read that!
There is a brief summary of RCP8.5, what it means, and why the Royal decided to use it:
The RCP 8.5 emissions trajectory is used throughout the report. The RCP 8.5 pathway is projected to lead to an increase in global mean surface temperatures of 2.6 °C to 4.8 °C for 2081–2100 relative to 1986–2005.62 Although RCP 8.5 is the highest emission scenario considered in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report, current emissions trends are closest to this scenario.63
I wondered if the authors thought nobody would understand the difference between an emissions scenario and a concentration pathway. Everybody at BH knows that, in order to reach its outlandish picture of the future, RCP8.5 is forced to make some outlandish assumptions, most notoriously that the efficacy of carbon sinks will decline over time, despite the literature not actually supporting such a case. There are also some wild assumptions about energy use and population growth that have been documented elsewhere.
Readers will also notice that the Royal uses the IPCC's projections of future warming, which are based on climate models that incorporate climate sensitivities much higher than observations would indicate are valid, and produce future warming higher than even their own climate sensitivities would suggest.
By this time I was beginning to get a feel for where the report was going with all this. What else did I notice? Well, there's this old chestnut:
In general, wet regions are likely to get wetter under climate change whilst dry regions become dryer.
As I pointed out in my recent GWPF briefing paper on rainfall, this is precisely the opposite of what has been observed during the period of global warming at the end of the last century. Indeed, just yesterday there was a tweet from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, which reported the presentation of one Professor Roderick:
Climate models do not project that the wet get wetter and dry get dryer. (They never did).
Climate models do not project the wet get wetter and the dry gets dryer, says Prof Michael Roderick. #arccss14 pic.twitter.com/Oz3Wx9u8nH
— Climate Scientists (@ClimateSystem) November 25, 2014
My GWPF paper had two citations to papers that contradicted the Royal Society's claim. Another tweet yesterday pointed at another. There do appear to be the most extraordinary contradictions between the Royal Society's report and what scientists believe.
Finally, I chanced upon the Royal Society's take on climate models and rainfall. It begins:
Climate models are much more reliable over long time periods and large spatial areas,
for example over several decades and on global scales.
To which the obvious question is, "How do they know?". I also discovered that climate models...
...are also more reliable for temperature than for precipitation and wind.
This is a bit like saying that Mother Theresa was a nicer person than Josef Stalin. True, but not exactly putting the reader in the picture. Really, the failure to tell the reader that climate models have little or no ability to predict precipitation makes the whole thing look as though it was written at the behest of an environmentalist (wait a moment...)
Perhaps though there is a hint of a scientist trying to make himself heard:
For weather extremes, which often occur at a more local level over shorter time scales, the ability to project changes due to either natural or anthropogenic climate change is more limited. Models also underestimate the high intensity, low probability events; the category into which weather extremes fall.
But by this point I'd lost the will to read further. Perhaps someone else can bear it.
Bishop Hill
I pointed out the Royal's error over "wet gets wetter" to Richard Betts:
@aDissentient Yes, I noticed that. Tsk. @c25AA @ClimateSystem @royalsociety
— Richard Betts (@richardabetts) November 27, 2014