Facts and models conflict on climate

Published 9:52 pm Wednesday, April 2, 2014

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Everyone panic! We’re all doomed — doomed! At least, that’s what the latest report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seems to be saying.

But do the facts back up the shrillness of the warning? Hardly.

After the first such report, in 2007, was refuted in point after point and claim after claim, the IPCC doubled down on the alarmism. When the newest report was issued on Monday, its authors claimed that “we’re all sitting ducks.”

They paint a future full of extinction, human misery, war and poverty — all tied to global warming.

The problem is that the evidence indicates none of these things.

“The report apparently admits that climate change has extinguished no species so far and expresses ‘very little confidence’ that it will do so,” explains British peer Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal. “There is new emphasis that climate change is not the only environmental problem that matters and on adapting to it rather than preventing it. Yet the report still assumes 70 percent more warming by the last decades of this century than the best science now suggests. This is because of an overreliance on models rather than on data in the first section of the IPCC report — on physical science — that was published in September 2013.”

In other words, when forced to choose between evidence and estimates, the IPCC relies on estimates. It even acknowledges this fact.

“The IPCC’s September 2013 report abandoned any attempt to estimate the most likely ‘sensitivity’ of the climate to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide,” Ridley points out. “The explanation, buried in a technical summary not published until January, is that ‘estimates derived from observed climate change tend to best fit the observed surface and ocean warming for [sensitivity] values in the lower part of the likely range.’ Translation: The data suggest we probably face less warming than the models indicate, but we would rather not say so.”

When the actual evidence is evaluated, the trend is not so alarming.

“In short, the warming we experienced over the past 35 years — about 0.4C (or 0.7F) if you average the measurements made by satellites and those made by ground stations — is likely to continue at about the same rate: a little over a degree a century,” Ridley says. “Briefly during the 1990s there did seem to be warming that went as fast as the models wanted. But for the past 15-17 years there has been essentially no net warming (a ‘hiatus’ now conceded by the IPCC), a fact that the models did not predict and now struggle to explain.”

Those models have been disproven time and time again. But the IPCC sticks with them, because they better support the report’s apocalyptic warnings.

How apocalyptic? The report warns that “Climate change will worsen problems that society already has, such as poverty, sickness, violence and refugees,” the Associated Press notes.

With such alarmism and ideological taint, the IPCC report does little to advance rational discussion of the issue. We’ll stick to the evidence.