Links tagged “ipcc”

iNews article by Andrew Marr. Where he literally uses the phrase “hinge to climate from Covid” several times:

There is a great turn coming, a change in the terms of political debate, a period of hinge. We are swinging from the many months of coronavirus obsession into an autumn which will be dominated, rightly, by the climate emergency. But much of what we have learned from Covid-19 – about the state, authority, journalism and civil society – is directly applicable to what’s coming next.” ... Of course, the two challenges are different. So far, a little over 4.3 million people have died from Covid. Australian and Chinese academics estimate that around five million people are dying each year from the effects of climate change […] Suffice it to say that even if the Delta variant is the most infectious disease mankind has so far faced, the climate emergency is at another level – a reshaper of geography, highly unpredictable and, in short, existential for the planet and its inhabitants.

...

It’s not hard to see exactly where this all leads. Mostly because they’re telling us. Establishment voices have already talked about “climate lockdowns”, and the UK’s Science Advisor Patrick Vallance wrote, last week, about how:  "nothing short of transforming society will avert catastrophe” This isn’t new. This has been bubbling along in the background for months (I have already written two articles about it), but the message is being refined into a simple three-step process: 

1. Point out all the ways Covid and climate change are similar.
2. Emphasise that Climate Change is much more of a threat than Covid. Use the word “existential. A lot.
3. Argue that since we were willing to change to fight Covid, we should do the same for climate.[optional]

The UN IPCC's “Optimal Fingerprinting” methodology on which they have long relied for attributing climate change to greenhouse gases is seriously flawed and its results are unreliable and largely meaningless.

That hopeful pathway, in which dangerous changes to the world's climate eventually stop, is the product of giant computer simulations of the world economy. They're called integrated assessment models. There are half a dozen major versions of them: four developed in Europe, one in Japan, and one in the U.S., at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. ... "The models tell us that there are, first of all, alternative pathways possible; that there are choices available to the decision-maker," he says. Different models, using different assumptions, arrive at contrasting visions of the future world. But they're all dramatically different from the situation today. ... 

Some models show people responding to higher energy prices or government regulations by changing their lifestyle. They move to more energy-saving houses, and give up their cars in favor of a new and better kind of public transit. In addition to traditional bus lines, autonomous vehicles respond like Uber — taking people where they need to go. Riahi likes this version best. "I'm convinced that a fundamental demand-side restructuring would also lead to a better quality of life," he says. (Keywan Riahi, at the International Institute for Applied Systems, in Austria, they found multiple paths to zero carbon.)

The peer-reviewed paper, produced by a team of almost two dozen scientists from around the world, concluded that previous studies did not adequately consider the role of solar energy in explaining increased temperatures. The new study was released just as the UN released its sixth “Assessment Report,” known as AR6, that once again argued in favor of the view that man-kind’s emissions of CO2 were to blame for global warming...“Depending on which published data and studies you use, you can show that all of the warming is caused by the sun, but the IPCC uses a different data set to come up with the opposite conclusion,” lead study author Ronan Connolly, Ph.D. told The Epoch Times in a video interview. 
“In their insistence on forcing a so-called scientific consensus, the IPCC seems to have decided to consider only those data sets and studies that support their chosen narrative,” he added.

IPCC Author Jim Kossin, who works for The Climate Service, a consultancy firm which helps corporations navigate Biden’s push for climate risk disclosure,: “I think people are more and more starting to get scared,” said Jim Kossin, senior scientist with climate risk firm The Climate Service who was among the IPCC authors for the chapter on extremes. “I think that’ll help to change people’s attitudes. And hopefully that’ll affect the way they vote.”

Dr. Roger Pielke Jr.: "At some point, the IPCC went down the path of favoring extreme scenarios. Not extreme climate scenarios, but extreme societal scenarios. Imagine a future, for example, where the only energy source we rely on is coal. We get rid of solar, wind, nuclear and natural gas. That’s pretty extreme. And it’s pretty out of line with where the world actually is now and where it’s headed. But still, this scenario is then fed into the climate models that produce projections of future impacts. There’s a ‘catastrophe bias’ baked into the IPCC. The IPCC has recognized this problem, finally, in its new report. But it hasn’t corrected it, which is unfortunate. The dynamic of the IPPC favoring the extreme scenario has been overlaid with the media, which takes an ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ approach to discussing the climate. It has also been overlaid with climate politics, which favors the extremes, too."

"Floods are not more frequent. Hurricanes and tropical cyclones are not more frequent. Meteorological and hydrological droughts are not more frequent. Tornadoes are not more frequent. Hail is not more frequent. Lightning is not more frequent. Strong winds are not more frequent. Heatwaves are more frequent, as is extreme precipitation (though the IPCC is very explicit that extreme precipitation is not to be conflated with flooding)."