The Fifth's first fiddle

The full text of the Fifth Assessment Report has been out for less than 24 hours and the tales of malfeasance are flowing already. Steve McIntyre has already blogged about some misleading behaviour by senior scientists involved in the review, but his post this morning is amazing, revealing how the discrepancy between climate models and observations was systematically hidden between the final review of the draft and the report issued to the public.

For the envelopes from the first three assessments, although they cite the same sources as the predecessor Second Draft Figure 1.4, the earlier projections have been shifted downwards relative to observations, so that the observations are now within the earlier projection envelopes. You can see this relatively clearly with the Second Assessment Report envelope: compare the two versions. At present, I have no idea how they purport to justify this.

None of this portion of the IPCC assessment is drawn from peer-reviewed material. Nor is it consistent with the documents sent to external reviewers.

Read the whole thing.

AR5 full report

The final AR5 report is now available here.

Lindzen on AR5

Mark Morano has obtained a statement from Dick Lindzen on the AR5 Summary for Policymakers. It's short, so I have taken the liberty of reproducing the whole thing here. Fair to say, Lindzen is not impressed:

I think that the latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence.  They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies between their models and observations increase.

Their excuse for the absence of warming over the past 17 years is that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean.  However, this is simply an admission that the models fail to simulate the exchanges of heat between the surface layers and the deeper oceans.  However, it is this heat transport that plays a major role in natural internal variability of climate, and the IPCC assertions that observed warming can be attributed to man depend crucially on their assertion that these models accurately simulate natural internal variability.  Thus, they now, somewhat obscurely, admit that their crucial assumption was totally unjustified.

Finally, in attributing warming to man, they fail to point out that the warming has been small, and totally consistent with there their being nothing to be alarmed about.  It is quite amazing to see the contortions the IPCC has to go through in order to keep the international climate agenda going.

AR5 press cuttings

Marcel Crok says that the good news in AR5 is being hidden.

Bob Tisdale says that the way the pause is being shown is comical.

Matt Ridley was on the Daily Politics, up against some of the slimiest creatures in British public life.

Judith Curry has fun explaining to a journalist how the IPCC gets to that 95% certain figure. She also gets a mention in the WSJ coverage.

The Today programme featured a piece with Chris Rapley and Lord Stern and another with Chief Scientist Sir Mark Walport, who thinks (believe it or not) that climate science needs new communication strategies. I kid you not. In a later section, John Ashton (former Foreign Office climate bod) and Connie St Louis (sci journalism person) discussed a range of issues on the periphery of the climate debate. Mostly this was a case of publicly funded officials trying to silence dissenting voices.

Update on Sep 28, 2013 by Bishop Hill

More links added:

The Shelagh Fogerty show on Five Live featured Emily Shuckburgh, Peter Stott of the Met Office and yours truly.

Benny Peiser was on BBC World News Today (from 9mins), up against Jeremy Leggett.

Meanwhile I was on Good Morning Scotland, up against Richard Dixon of Friends of the Earth.

FiveLive Drive had two slots, one with Jo Haigh and another featuring Ed Hawkins and Tamsin Edwards.

Tamsin E. has posted a page of all her media appearances here.

Thoughts on the SPM

Ducking, diving, bobbing and weaving are the general themes of the Summary for Policymakers, just released this morning.

You would imagine that the document would review what was said last time round and how things have changed since that time, but you'd be wrong. This is, after all, the bureaucracy at work: difficulties have to be brushed under carpets and stones left unturned.

It would, for example, have been interesting for AR5 to discuss the increase in hurricane intensity that the AR4 SPM said was "likely" on the basis of the climate models. Instead, we get a veil drawn over the subject, with not a word on the hurricane drought in recent years.

Click to read more ...

BREAKING! IPCC responds - Josh 239

We are all very excited about the IPCC Summary for Policymakers coming tomorrow, Friday 27th September, but today we can reveal an exclusive pre-press conference handy crib sheet to all your questions. Yes, all of them. Thanks to all those who asked 5 questions - here are the 5 answers...

Click to read more ...

Newsnight on AR5

BBC Newsnight featured a long segment on the Fifth Assessment Report last night, featuring Ed Hawkins, Myles Allen, Anastasios Tsonis, and Emily Shuckburgh. (From 22 mins)

Harrabin cites Marcott

It's hard to imagine a more thoroughly discredited scientific result than the Marcott graph, which must rank amongst climatology's most shameful moments. Nevertheless, the BBC's Roger Harrabin has given it the full-page treatment in his latest piece on the IPCC, as eye-candy to go alongside an interview of Rajendra Pachauri.

Meanwhile, Marcel Crok gets a mention in this Matt McGrath piece on the key questions facing the IPCC.

Spiegel on the IPCC's dilemma

In an article published in its English language edition today, Der Spiegel covers the IPCC's dilemma over the pause - very much the same ground I dealt with in my Spectator blog the other day.

Data shows global temperatures aren't rising the way climate scientists have predicted. Now the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change faces a problem: publicize these findings and encourage skeptics -- or hush up the figures.

Bob's dinner

I think my radio appearance this morning may have spoilt Bob Ward's breakfast, judging by the spluttering this morning.

Dinner will be no better - I'm due to be on the BBC TV news tonight. As I understand it there are two slots, one at 6pm and one at 10pm, covering different angles of the climate/IPCC story.

AR5 Leake

Jonathan Leake has a full-page article in the Sunday Times (paywalled). It's a pretty good summary of the state of play as we head to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report next week although I don't think there's anything that will be news to readers here.

What seems clear is that whatever our response to climate change, whether it is geoengineering or replacing fossil-fueled electricity generation with low-carbon power stations and wind farms, the bills are likely to be astronomical. As long as public confidence in climate science is falling, it would be a brave political leader to sanction spending on that scale.

An unequivocal rejection of the scientific method

Justin Gillis, the green guy at the New York Times, has an extraordinary take on climate sensitivity in his latest column. Discussing the upcoming Fifth Assessment Report he tries to claim that all the empirical and semi-empirical measures of ECS are "outliers"

...we have mainstream science that says if the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles, which is well on its way to happening, the long-term rise in the temperature of the earth will be at least 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, but more likely above 5 degrees. We have outlier science that says the rise could come in well below 3 degrees.

Click to read more ...

Counter-sceptics

In Bloomberg yesterday, it was announced that governments are asking the IPCC to spend more time on explaining away the pause in the imminent Fifth Assessment Report:

They’re requesting that more details on the so-called “hiatus” be included in a key document set to be debated at a UN conference next month that will summarize the latest scientific conclusions on climate change.

And why do they want this to happen? One suggestion for the reason why comes from Vivian Bob Ward:

Including more information on the hiatus will help officials counter arguments that the slowing pace of global warming in recent years is a sign that the long-term trend may be discounted, according to Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.

Click to read more ...

A sneak peek at the IPCC report

Reuters seems to have managed to get itself a peek at the IPCC report. Hard though it is to believe, things are worse than we thought.

Drafts seen by Reuters of the study by the U.N. panel of experts, due to be published next month, say it is at least 95 percent likely that human activities - chiefly the burning of fossil fuels - are the main cause of warming since the 1950s.

That is up from at least 90 percent in the last report in 2007, 66 percent in 2001, and just over 50 in 1995, steadily squeezing out the arguments by a small minority of scientists that natural variations in the climate might be to blame.

That shifts the debate onto the extent of temperature rises and the likely impacts, from manageable to catastrophic. Governments have agreed to work out an international deal by the end of 2015 to rein in rising emissions.

Read the whole thing.

IPCC vice-chairman flaunts his bias

The underemployed in the green blogosphere have been kicking up a minor fuss in recent days over the decision of Google to hold a fundraiser for sceptic senator Jim Inhofe. Interestingly, the pressure on Google has now been taken up by none other than IPCC vice chairman Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, who tweeted as follows.

.@EricSchmidt Are you OK with @Google, your company, funding climate #skeptics? http://thinkprogress.org/?p=2257691  @climatecentral @revkin

I think this fairly conclusively kills the idea that the IPCC is a body that tries to make an even handed assessment of the global warming question.