Fears are growing that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) could water down or even ditch its current finding that almost all types of extreme weather events have little or no sign of past human involvement, or any going forward to 2100.
The finding in its recent sixth assessment report is a major thorn in the side of alarmists since ‘extreme’ weather event attribution has recently risen to become the major scare tactic used to promote the Net Zero fantasy. The IPCC finding has been ignored and a large pseudoscience ‘attribution’ industry has been created within the Green Blob to feed improbable and uncheckable ‘scientists say’ stories into the mainstream. At a recent ‘scoping’ meeting to prepare for the IPCC’s seventh assessment report, the press release claimed, in direct contradiction of previous work, that a century of burning fossil fuels has resulted in “more frequent and more intense extreme weather events that have caused increasingly dangerous impacts”.
The position on not attributing bad weather directly to anthropogenic causes has been a great credit to the IPCC. It has often faced justifiable criticism in the past that it is a biased body highly selective in the science it highlights. Recent research from Clintel discovered that no less than 42% of its climate scenarios used worst-case ‘pathways’ of highly improbable temperature rises. Its ‘Summary for Policymakers’ (SPM) is a political document and has to be agreed by politicians from all 195 subscribing countries. Curiously, the IPCC assessment statement that the high-temperature pathway was of “low likelihood” was missing from the more widely-distributed SPM.
Nevertheless, the IPCC in its original 1998 remit is mandated with acting on an “objective, open and transparent basis” when investigating human-induced climate change. It is also established that its reports should be “neutral with respect to policy”. All the evidence points to these instructions being often ignored.
The distinguished science writer Roger Pielke Jr. sees clear dangers ahead noting the comments of the new IPCC Chair Professor Jim Skea at the recent COP 29 in Azerbaijan which he said focused entirely on advocacy. “I want to focus most of my remarks on the opportunities – and indeed the benefits – of near-term action. But first a few words on urgency,” said Skea. It is not within the IPCC’s mandate to call for action or implore urgency, observes Pielke. “There are plenty of groups who play that role. There is only one IPCC,” he added.
Read More: IPCC U-Turn as it Prepares to Start Blaming Humans for Bad Weather
