It has been an interesting year. The pause keeps on pausing, not foreseen by the climate scientists. The climate models seem to exaggerate warming and went consistently higher than the observations, with sevaral scientists doubting the skill of those climate models. Antarctic had the highest ice extent in the recorded history, Arctic ice had the lowest in recorded history last year, but a sudden, unexpected, increase this year. Scientists found that CO2 sensitivity was stated much too high. The last years winters, that were said to get shorter and warmer, were longer and colder. Hurricanes are decreasing and only got the attention because the media pumped them up considerably. All this in a world with record concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere! In the last year lots of things were remarked that are still going unexplained.
In that light I was very curious about the (now just released) IPCC report AR5 Summary for Policy Makers. Would they mention some doubt this time? In the last days we heard about politicians that wanted to be informed about this unexpected hiatus. That made me even more hopeful. But then there were also politicians that didn’t want it to be acknowledged in order to keep the fear going.
With much interest I saw the evening VRT news. They have the habit of pumping up the volume on climate news. They surely didn’t disappoint on that (probably more in a later post). After the view of calving ice, the alarming tone of Thomas Stocker, co chair of the IPCC:
A very simple statement: one of the 18 key messages that the 110 governments that were present in this room for four days have adopted in consensus: human influence on the climate system is clear.
Other media said about the same. No shred of doubt in their message.
Skimming though the AR5 Summary for Policy Makers torpedoed my ever shrinking hope of finding some acknowledgement. Only the usual depressing and one sided statements.
So, in spite of a bunch of unexplained things, in spite of the observations not developing like the models said it would and in spite of the new found facts that contradicts the previous assumptions, they now basically let the world know that they are even more certain than ever! ¿Qué?
More, how can one be more certain that we are the cause of increasing temperatures when there is a pause of a decade/decade and a half?
If one needs evidence of the IPCC being a political organization, then this would be it. It is clear they are not interested in explaining the truth,the whole truth and nothing but the truth. They just want to keep the alarm going.
Trust, yet verify 