Breaking news: leaked IPCC climate change report admits ‘we got it wrong’

Edited by Benny Peiser

A leaked copy of the world’s most authoritative climate study reveals scientific forecasts of imminent doom were drastically wrong. The Mail on Sunday has obtained the final draft of a report to be published later this month by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the ultimate watchdog whose massive, six-yearly ‘assessments’ are accepted by environmentalists, politicians and experts as the gospel of climate science. The IPCC recognises the global warming ‘pause’ first reported by The Mail on Sunday last year is real – and concede that their computer models did not predict it. But they cannot explain why world average temperatures have not shown any statistically significant increase since 1997. –David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 15 September 2013

Last night Professor Judith Curry, head of climate science at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, said the leaked Summary for Policy-makers showed that ‘the science is clearly not settled, and is in a state of flux’. She said  it therefore made no sense that the IPCC was claiming that its confidence in its forecasts and conclusions has increased. ‘The consensus-seeking process used by the IPCC creates and amplifies biases in the science. It should be abandoned in favour of a more traditional review that presents arguments for and against – which would  better support scientific progress, and be more useful for policy makers.’ –David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 15 September 2013

Dr Benny Peiser, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, described the leaked report as a ‘staggering concoction of confusion, speculation and sheer ignorance’.  As for the pause, he said ‘it would appear that the IPCC is running out of answers … to explain why there is a widening gap between predictions and reality’. –David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 15 September 2013

The British Met Office has issued ‘erroneous statements  and misrepresentations’ about  the pause in global warming  – and its climate computer model is fundamentally flawed, says  a new analysis by a leading independent researcher. Nic Lewis, a climate scientist and accredited ‘expert reviewer’ for the IPCC, also points out that Met Office’s flagship climate model suggests the world  will warm by twice as much in response to CO2 as some other leading institutes, such as Nasa’s climate centre in America. –David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 15 September 2013

Since the last IPCC report in 2007, much has changed. It is now more than 15 years since global average temperature rose significantly. Indeed, the IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri has conceded that the “pause” already may have lasted for 17 years, depending on which data set you look at. A recent study in Nature Climate Change by Francis Zwiers and colleagues of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, found that models have overestimated warming by 100% over the past 20 years. Explaining this failure is now a cottage industry in climate science. The most plausible explanation of the pause is simply that climate sensitivity was overestimated in the models because of faulty assumptions about net amplification through water-vapor feedback. This will be a topic of heated debate at the political session to rewrite the report in Stockholm, starting on Sept. 23, at which issues other than the actual science of climate change will be at stake. –Matt Ridley, The Wall Street Journal, 14 September 2013

There is a degree of nervousness internationally that the central climate change message is being lost as efforts are being made to build a global agreement. The concern is the Abbott government’s change of heart on a carbon tax will encourage other countries to delay or weaken their commitment. The election of an Abbott government has focused attention on Australia. Former prime minister John Howard has been booked to deliver this year’s Global Warming Policy Foundation lecture in November. The title of his address: One Religion is Enough. –Graham Lloyd, The Australian, 14 September 2013

A new study in the journal Nature Climate Change that compared 117 climate predictions made in the 1990′s to the actual amount of warming finds that 99% of them overestimated the amount of warming. On average, the predictions forecasted two times more global warming than actually occurred. –Maxim Lott, Fox News, 12 September 2013

Scientists have had only limited success persuading us to care about climate change so perhaps it is time to call in the philosophers. That appears to be the approach of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has engaged a philosopher to help to produce its forthcoming report on how to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Professor Broome’s role appears to be to rein in the economists in the IPCC team and remind them to take ethics into account when considering how much governments should spend on cutting emissions. He contributed to Lord Stern’s Review of the Economics of Climate Change, which was criticised by many economists for justifying spending billions of pounds mitigating climate change by attaching a much higher value to goods available in the next century. –Ben Webster, The Times, 11 September 2013

1) IPCC Report Leaked: Scientists Admit They Got Warming Rate Wrong – Mail on Sunday, 15 September 2013

2) Met Office Misleading Public On Global Warming Pause, New Study – Mail on Sunday, 15 September 2013

3) Matt Ridley: Dialing Back The Alarm On Climate Change – The Wall Street Journal, 14 September 2013

4) Carbon Tax On Ice, Climate Science Struggles To Deal With Warming Pause – The Australian, 14 September 2013

5) 99% Of Climate Model Predictions Overestimated Global Warming, Study Finds – Fox News, 12 September 2013

6) IPCC Calls In Moral Philosopher As People Cool On Global Warming – The Times, 11 September 2013