Monday
Dec092013
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill AR5 - the Synthesis Report
Dec 9, 2013 Climate: IPCC 
Tallbloke has got hold of the pre-first order draft of the AR5 WGI Synthesis Report.
Read it here.
Dec 9, 2013 Climate: IPCC
Reader Comments (20)
Does this mean the local constabulary will be coming to take away his computers again?
WGIThe Synthesis Report covers all three Working Groups.
@Lapogus
I hope so. I've got my eye on a whizzy new laptop my legal guy will get them to buy for me.
I like your logic, Mr Tallbloke; however, you do realise that it will be the tax-payer paying for your new laptop, don’t you?
While I have no qualms about subsidising champions such as yourself, there will be others who will not like it… Actually, that makes your idea sound even better!
Has anyone read it? I've scanned few the techie bits and the adaptation/mitigation. The new mot de jour is "risk", this trumps uncertainty every time, so if the science is uncertain/unknown, we still have to follow the green agenda.
Somewhere in the WG1 bit the lament the fall in agricultural output through global warming seemingly forgetting that vast areas of agricultural land have been moved over to the production of biofuels. As the models are absolute crap they couldn't possibly have foreseen the record records of agricultural output for 2012 .
They also say the Sahel tree density is decreasing without mentioning that its green areas are growing.
Then there's this little beauty:
"There has been increased heat-related mortality and decreased cold-related mortality in some 39 regions as a result of warming (medium confidence) [WGII SPM A-1]. Extreme heat events 40 currently result in increases in mortality and morbidity in North America (very high confidence), 41 with impacts that vary by age, location and socioeconomic factors (high confidence) [26.6.1.2]. In 42 Europe, the summer 2003, which was the hottest summer in the last 500 years, caused 35,000 43 excess deaths [Table 23.1]. An extreme warm event occurred in Moscow during July and August 44 2010 in the hottest summer since 1500 with estimated 10,000 excess deaths [WGII Table 23.1]."
No mention as to why nothing has happened except the Russian heat wave since 2003, and the causes of the Russian heat wave aren't attributable to global warming anyway. Note also no numbers applied to the deaths from cold, which in the UK alone were 31,000 extra deaths last year.
Apparently nothing good will come out the Earth warming, it will be all bad. There must have been no scientific papers looking at the positive effects of a warming world, which, I suppose tells us where the grant money is.
I scanned further down, it's a document produced by environmentalists and the scientists associated with it should be ashamed of themselves.
Para 1.2 says it all. 'Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.... The atmophere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished and sea level has risen...'
No point in reading further. The science is settled...
Resistance is futile...
Sherlock
I got as far as that bit and instantly lost interest..
On another thread somebody says "bring on the blackouts". I doubt even blackouts will lead to a sensible debate.
I get more pessimistic with every blog post I read.
From this report, one may make the assumption that: Lies, lies, and still more lies; but keep telling them through mainstream media reinforcement (Inc the grossly bias BBC) Joe public will believe it.
Not until either the lights go out, their pockets become empty and their jobs disappear will the ambivalent masses take notice?
That is unless some very large media organizations become brave and "fess up" to the overwhelming truth about (A) the benefits of a slight warming to the UK and (B) that there is no real warming but a real 95% certainty of a cooling phase in our climate within the next 20-30 years.
May be then the public mood may change towards these Politicians and the destructive NGO environmentalists inc the IPCC and of course our own Lunatic govern"mental"DECC.
This issue must confuse many members of our society who probably believe very little of what our political class tells them as the truth on most matters of public concern, yet like “lemmings” they believe with 97% certainty that alleged AGW is real and dangerous to all of us here in the UK.
Bring on the Mediterranean weather for me; I could make my own wine very cheaply from the grapes growing on my south facing walls.
Forgive my illiteracy. What is the WGI synthesis report? Is it the whole shebang for AR5?
The pre First Order Draft of AR5 shows exactly how uncertainties are handled by IPCC. Early you say something reasonable, like on page 5:
“Many aspects of the climate system are not yet well understood and quantified, such as the likelihood of a large, rapid release of methane from hydrates in the seabed. Furthermore, many variable factors determine the relationship between radiative forcing and climate changes, between climate changes and socioeconomic outcomes, and between policies and socioeconomic outcomes. These introduce complex interacting sources of uncertainty, many of which may never be quantified. Differing and even contradictory evaluations of risk can result, leading to a range of assessments by policy makers.”
Then the rest of the document repeats with varying degrees of certainty, all of the global warming doctrine, as though nothing had been learned since Hansen’s Senate testimony.
When the lights go out then the answer will be to nationlise the power companies. It's obviously the solution to all our problems. Then the DECC gurus can really take the helm and steer us to their green paradise where the laws of economics and physics are back to front.
I am unable to view Tallbloke's website together with WUWT's comments. Internet Explorer just shuts them down saying that there is a problem with the site. Is this me or are there some warmist gremlins at work?
Tom - do yourself a favour and stop using IE....
Thanks, Philip. I was coming round to that, albeit slowly.
I skimmed it and picked up a couple of points before I lost the will to live.....
The arctic is melting faster than evah, but the data analysis stops at 2012 and ignores the big freeze this year, and,
Solar variance has a negligable influence on climate, and cosmic rays will not cause more clouds - so we're not all going to freeze.
So that's all right then.
Risk is the new guiding principle ? There was a risk of eternal damnation last year if we didnt live with Harold Camping in a cave.
Eternal damnation is miles worse than two degrees of warming in my book. In fact I would push the boat out here, its probably worse than three degrees of warming.
How many greenies sold their house and moved in with Camping ?
And also, the models are absolutely trustworthy on climate sensitivity
Again from the AR5 draft:
"There is very high confidence that models reproduce the general features of the global-scale annual mean surface temperature increase over the historical period, including the more rapid warming in the second half of the 20th century, and the cooling immediately following large volcanic eruptions. The observed decrease in the rate of recent surface warming is attributable in roughly equal measure to a cooling contribution from internal variability and a reduced trend in external forcing (expert judgment, medium confidence)." Page 20
"The long-term surface-warming trend observed over 1951–2012 is consistent with simulations of the historical period with current climate models over the same period (Box SYR.1, Figure 1c, very high confidence). The record of observed climate change has also allowed characterisation of the basic properties of the climate system that have implications for future warming, including the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) and the transient climate response (TCR) and thus contributes to the assessment of both climate system properties. Conversely, the independent estimates of radiative forcing, of observed heat storage, and of surface warming that have been available since 1970 combine to give a heat budget for the Earth that is consistent with the assessed likely range of equilibrium climate sensitivity (1.5–4.5 ºC)" page 21
Bujt wait a minute. There is this:
"There is considerable uncertainty in present and future total radiative forcing estimates, largely due to uncertainty in aerosol effects [WGI 7, 12]. RCPs are implemented in ESMs by prescribing emissions or forcing levels of aerosol precursors. As a result, aerosol concentration differs across ESMs, leading to differences between the expected RCP radiative forcing scenario and its implementation in a given ESM. ESMs exhibit rapid adjustments to the initial forcing, leading to an additional cloud forcing effect, which also varies across models. The combination of these two effects leads to the range of effective radiative forcing simulated by the CMIP5 ESMs (Figure 2.2)[WGI, 8.5.3, 12.3.3]" page 27
Yes, RISK is the new buzzword. Hilary Ostrov ran a wordcount:
Environment: 34
Political: 17
Uncertain*: 69
Risk: 216
As I pointed out on Tamsin Edwards recent post:
Communicating risk and uncertainty in climate science isn’t such a big problem if it is approached with honesty and humility.
“We don’t know why our models are so far out of step with climate data, we might have made a mistake with theory, or parameterisations, or data inhomogeneity, or missing variables. So we can’t say much about risk, since currently the ‘projections’ we make contain so much uncertainty.”
Since this message didn't seem to get through first time I tried again:
Tamsin: "It’s just a statement that climate scientists tend not to describe their results in terms of risk, and that it might be useful if they did. That’s all."
As I pointed out in my first comment; once a realistic assessment of model uncertainty is made, you’re no longer in a position to say anything about risk worth betting a ships peanut on, let alone national economies and energy blackouts in hospitals.
So if the debate is to be reframed in terms of risk, (and the word counts on the early draft of the AR5 synthesis report I have just made available at my website indicate it is), then the uncertainty issue will have to be dealt with more honestly, or the perception will be that it’s another attempt to ‘move on’ from unfinished business and gloss over the cracks in the argument’s foundations.
I tried to read it, I honestly did, but after the first couple of paras I asked myself why I was bothering, and stopped.
Only the faithful would bother wading through such mind-numbing nonsense, as for accepting such utter tosh, one would have to be locked into a particularly doom-laden mindset. The thing is harder to read than an original script by Will Shakespeare with his idiosyncratic spelling and lack of gaps between words, and a helluva lot less rewarding.
The AR5 draft also provides some future projections for the climate.
See 2.5 Projected changes in the climate system pages 30ff
Here are the Headlines (Expect to see these in the media soon)
CO2 will drive warming for centuries to come
Surface air temperature will be up to 4.8C higher by 2100
More hot extremes and heat waves
Less rain in dry areas and more rain in wet regions
Stronger and wetter cyclones
Nearly ice-free Arctic by mid century
NH spring snow cover reduced up to 25%
Near surface permafrost reduced up to 81%
Global glacier volume by 2100 reduced up to 85%
Global mean sea level rises up to 1 m by 2100
Ocean surface ph 0.3 more acid by 2100
Should we be concerned?