Code Red For Sanity – The Credibility Crisis At The IPCC

When speaking about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report Climate Change 2021: The Physical Sciences Basis, UN Secretary-General António Guterres declared it a “code red for humanity.”

He further stressed, “The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable.” [bold, links added]

But a person who reads the report dispassionately and thoroughly will recognize that there is no code red for humanity and that the evidence is indeed refutable. It would be more accurate to say the report is a code red for sanity.

Classical science observes what is; that’s the evidence. A political agenda persuades what should be done; that’s the alarm bells.

Let’s turn off the alarm the IPCC pulled by examining Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis (referred to from this point as “the report”).

You’ll discover that while the report contains some scientific evidence, much of it is hidden, manipulated, or contradicted.

Because of this, we’ll refute the so-called evidence in the report by explaining how the science has been misrepresented.

Let’s bring sanity back to science.

The report has four major themes where the political agenda has overrun classical science.

Theme 1: Climate history was altered.

The IPCC would like you to believe that the Earth’s temperature has been constant for thousands of years and that the approximate 1°C of warming is unprecedented.

The report offers this figure to support that view:

In Figure SPM.1, 100,000 years of temperature maximums are depressed and the temperature history since 1 AD is flattened.

This misleads the reader into blaming the global warming rebound that ended the Little Ice Age in 1850 on CO2 emissions. The famous hockey-stick graph has been recreated.

Several well-established, significant climate-change events refuting the IPCC’s contention of thousands of years of a hockey-stick temperature graph are missing. These events are as follows:

• Beginning 14,500 years ago there was 12°C warming over a few centuries, then a plunge back into glaciation by 12,800 years ago.
• Then 11,500 years ago as much as 10°C of warming occurred in as little as 50 years—10 times the total warming at 20 times the rate of warming compared to current global warming.
• The IPCC report of 1998 (now taken offline) showed this warming continuing and peaking about 6,000 years ago, called the Holocene Maximum, and described it as “… a relatively warm climate with summer temperatures in high northern latitudes about 3 to 4°C above modern values.” That would mean it was 4 to 5°C warmer during the Holocene Maximum than in 1850.
• The Holocene cooled to about 2°C warmer than 1850 temperatures, but then came the Roman Warming period beginning 2,500 years ago and ending about 535 AD. It was warmer by 3°C or more than in 1850.
• The Dark Ages from 535 to 900 cooled down to the same temperature as in 1850.
• The Medieval Warm Period from 900 to 1300 was up to 3°C warmer than 1850.
• The Little Ice Age was from 1300 to 1850. Greenland ice core data indicates 1875 was the coldest year in the last 10,000 years. Then it began to warm up again to today’s temperature before massive volumes of human-emitted CO2 began.

What’s really missing from the IPCC temperature history is that for thousands of years, the Earth has been warmer than it is today. This is evidenced by the temperature graph derived from the Greenland ice cores below.

If you would like to know more about how the temperature history was altered, please read: To Further Warming Panic, The IPCC Is Rewriting The Climate Record.

Theme 2: A deceptive graph was constructed to exaggerate CO2’s impact.

CO2 is a gas that can cause global warming through the greenhouse gas effect. The graph below was designed to lead you to conclude that all the CO2 added by humans since 1850 has caused 1°C of global warming up to 2019 and that a similar addition of CO2 will cause similar global warming in the future.

The leading title “Every tonne of CO2 emissions adds to global warming” combined with the trailing caption, “Near-linear relationship between cumulative CO2 emissions and the increase in global surface temperature”, would lead a reasonable reader to conclude that every tonne of CO2 added to the atmosphere has caused, and will continue to cause, a near-linear increase in global temperatures.

Contained in the same report are three statements that contradict the above graph:

• The IPCC states (reference clause A.1.3) the opinion that it is likely (their italics) that all the warming from 1850 to 2019 was human-caused. They define likely as a 66% to 100% probability, which does not rule out a probability of up to 34% of natural climate change between 1850 and 2019.
• Figure SPM.2 in the same report (not included here) shows that only about 50% of the total greenhouse gas warming was caused by CO2, and the remainder by mostly other greenhouse gases (significantly methane).
• It is well-established, even by the IPCC, that the mathematical relationship between CO2 concentrations and global warming is logarithmic, not linear. Confirmation is buried deep in almost 4,000 pages of the report (reference 5.5.1.2.1 line 42). The fact that the relationship is logarithmic means the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere must be doubled each time to get the same global warming effect. Therefore, future CO2 additions will have a severely diminished effect on global warming compared to the previous CO2 emissions.

If you would like a more detailed examination of this graph, please refer to IPCC: Programmed To Deceive The Media, Policymakers, And You.

 Theme 3: The forecasts are dodgy.

The IPCC forecasts have a long history of overestimating future global warming. Former IPCC contributing author Patrick Michaels and environmental scientist Paul Knappenberger identified these miscalculations the IPCC made prior to 2014:

• The 30-year forecasts (1985 to 2014) overestimated global warming by a factor of 1.5.
• The 20-year forecasts (1995 to 2014) overestimated global warming by a factor of 2.5.
• The 10-year forecasts (2005 to 2014) failed to predict that there was no global warming at all.

The report, published in 2021, seeks to assure the reader that the IPCC’s current simulations are better.

It claims that when the data is input for a known period of time the simulations accurately replicate the known temperature change.

When a simulator can achieve a good history match, also known as hindcasting, it builds confidence that its forecasts are believable.

In the figure below, the IPCC offers the observed temperature map (on the left) with the computer simulation results (on the right) of 1°C global warming:

It appears to be almost a perfect history match. Both maps indicate relatively uniform warming of one degree in the tropics, with the Arctic being two degrees warmer.

According to the IPCC, their observed temperature map (above, left-hand side) was constructed using data from Berkeley Earth, which independently came up with the map below of observed temperature changes using the same dataset:

What’s interesting is that the Berkeley map shows a chaotic climate system with warming and cooling over both land and water simultaneously, with the overall result being net warming.

The maximum temperature contrasts between warming and cooling regions are about 10°C. This is not reflected in the IPCC observed temperature map, which instead shows consistent global warming patterns.

The Berkeley Earth map confirms that our planet’s climate is much more chaotic and much more volatile than the IPCC observes or simulates, yet the IPCC claims to use the same data in their observed map.

If you are interested in a more in-depth analysis of this issue, please read: Why IPCC Climate Forecasts Are So Dodgy

 Theme 4: The proposed solution of a carbon budget doesn’t balance.

The IPCC’s proposed solution to limit global warming caused by CO2 is to impose upon the world a CO2 emissions budget. The budget calculates how much more CO2 can be emitted into the atmosphere before a specific global warming threshold is reached.

A credibility problem with the report is that it simultaneously argues three mutually exclusive relationships between CO2 emissions and global warming. You’ll recognize two of them from Theme 2 of this article.

First, the IPCC proposed the scenario that the relationship is linear, implying that every additional volume of CO2 causes the same global warming effect.

Since approximately 2,250 gigatonnes of CO2 caused 1°C of warming, a linear-based budget should indicate that another 2,250 gigatonnes will warm the planet by another 1°C.

At today’s emission rates that would take about 55 years. The IPCC CO2 budget is not linear.

The second, and correct relationship between CO2 emissions and global warming is logarithmic, acknowledged multiple times by the IPCC. The amount of CO2 must be doubled for the same temperature increase.

In a logarithmic budget, we would have to add another 4500 gigatonnes, twice as much as added previously, to gain an additional 1°C of warming. This would take about 110 years at today’s emission rates.

Although this relationship is acknowledged by the IPCC, their CO2 budget is not logarithmic.

The third, an exponential relationship, is what the IPCC CO2 budget appears to be. The budget uses more precise numbers than the graphs, and it shows that the first 1.07°C of global warming was caused by 2,390 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions.

The next 0.93°C of global warming (to reach the limit of a total of 2°C) will only take 1,150 gigatonnes, less than half of the historical human emissions. That’s only 28 years from now at current emission rates. This is wrong.

If you are interested in a fuller discussion of the problems with the IPCC CO2 budget refer to Why the IPCC’s Carbon Budget Won’t Balance. 

Conclusion: There’s a New Credibility Crisis at the IPCC.

In my book, I assert there was a credibility crisis of political interference at the IPCC due to the claims they made in the report Climate Change 2013: The Physical Sciences Basis.

Disappointingly, the updated Climate Change 2021: The Physical Sciences Basis completes the colonization of science by politics.

The classical scientific description of what is has been altered to support the political agenda of what should be done by these means:

• Rewriting climate history to hide naturally occurring climate change and proposing the global warming recovery from the Little Ice Age was caused only by human emissions of CO2
• Constructing a false argument that the CO2-global warming relationship is linear in order to draw the conclusion that CO2’s impact will be constant in the future
• Fabricating an observed global warming map to enhance the stature of the climate forecast models, whereas the actual observed global warming map is radically different
• Preparing a CO2 emission budget that wildly overstates CO2’s diminishing contribution as a global warming greenhouse gas

Throw into the same mix that this report concludes there is only a 66 percent probability that the global warming since 1850 was caused by humans, and of that human contribution only half was caused by carbon dioxide.

How is it, then, that Climate Change 2021: The Physical Sciences Basis was used by governments, legal courts, and the mainstream media to confirm that carbon dioxide is an existential threat to humanity?

The report is essentially a code red for sanity, and confirmation that the IPCC lacks scientific credibility.

Ron Barmby is a Professional Engineer with a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree, whose 40+ year career in the energy sector has taken him to over 40 countries on five continents. His book “Sunlight on Climate Change: A Heretic’s Guide to Global Climate Hysteria” (Amazon, Barnes & Noble) explains in understandable terms the science of how both natural and human-caused global warming work. Over two dozen other articles and presentations can be found at www.ronaldbarmby.ca.

The author gives permission to use all or parts of this article provided that any such use is accompanied by author attribution and a link to the original article.