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Speaking with Fox News the same day, Competitive Enterprise Institute Center for Energy and Environment senior fellow and ICPP reviewer Patrick J. Michaels said he believes the report and its conclusions were “mired in the atmosphere of unreality.”
“The U.N. has been pushing the climate story since 1988 – that’s a long time ago – when it established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And, that panel was established specifically to provide what they call the basis for a possible treaty on climate. Any committee that is assigned such a specific assignment will do exactly as it was told. And, therefore, the composition of the [IPCC] – the authors – are selectively chosen because they know the results they are going to get,” he said.
“The real reason this report is so extreme is that the previous reports have not elicited the actions that its proponents wanted,” Michaels noted. “And, in fact, people are becoming increasingly tired of stories about the end of the world.”
Michaels, a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society, took issue with the report’s Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) modeling.
Michaels, who says he is not a climate change skeptic, said if the report had used best practice models instead the issue would have “fallen apart.”
That said, the report states that CMIP6 modeling includes “new and better representation of physical, chemical and biological processes, as well as higher resolution, compared to climate models considered in previous IPCC assessment reports.”
David Legates, a professor of climatology at the University of Delaware and a policy expert at the Heartland Institute, took issue with what he says is the political nature of the report.
“So, it’s a panel of government officials who have been selected by the various governments. And, of course, they all have axes to grind,” the former Trump-era National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) senior official said.
“So, [there are] certain things they want to say. [There are] certain things they want to guarantee. Many of these nations want to make sure that carbon dioxide is an evil gas because ‘if we can tax it we can make sure that we can get our cut of the money that they’re taking away from other people.’ And so, they have a vested interest in not the science – whatever that may be – but in stating that carbon dioxide is sort of an evil gas and therefore has to be regulated and has to be controlled.”
For those looking to find a glimmer of hope in the new IPCC report, researchers found that majorly catastrophic disasters or “tipping points” were of “low likelihood,” including ice sheet collapses and the abrupt slowdown of ocean currents.
Michael Shellenberger, the author of “Apocalypse Never” and founder and president of Environmental Progress, told Fox News that most of the important trends regarding climate change are currently headed in the right direction.”
“Climate change is real. It’s caused by human emissions – at least a significant amount of it is. And, we should try to do something about it because – all else being equal – it’s better for temperatures to not change. But, of course, not all else is equal,” he said.
“Climate change is being caused by human emissions, which are caused by humans trying to improve lives for themselves and their children. Not just through fossil fuel use but also through land-use change,” he continued. “And so, you’re always looking to balance the benefits of energy consumption with the downsides. But, the trends are mostly going in the right direction.”
Shellenberger said the IPCC report’s “scary” scenarios were inaccurate because there is “no possibility” that they could occur due to the usage of natural gas over coal across the world.
The environmental journalist said that while the IPCC science is “mostly fine,” he highlighted that there are “some games that get played” in the panel’s reports, including “a bunch of scenarios that basically everybody acknowledges [are] not going to happen because we’re not going to increase coal use sixfold.”
The report’s claim that the world is seeing more extreme weather is misleading, Shellenberger says, because it leads people to think that disasters are getting worse.
Droughts can be worsened by warmer temperatures but are explained by natural variability and high-intensity fires can be avoided by better forest management, he argued – though allowing that climate scientists can point to longer fire seasons over larger geographic areas.
Nevertheless, he said human beings are more resilient to extreme weather events and carbon emissions would go down globally over the coming decade.
“The takeaway is that climate change is not what people think it is. It is significantly outweighed by things like droughts, which are still determined by natural variables and by economic development and preparedness, and we’re just so much better prepared,” he told Fox News.
“We’re more resilient to changing temperatures than we’ve ever been and it’s just not the end of the world.”
