Monckton emits a silent scream - and gets the IPCC report wrong (as usual)

Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, otherwise known as the potty peer (among other things) is suffering memory loss.  Well, he probably always was batty so this will not come as a surprise to anyone.

Today Anthony Watts, who doesn't care what nonsense he publishes as long as it is anti-science, put up an article by Christopher Monckton that doesn't make a lot of sense. (Archived here.)

The headline reads:

IPCC silently slashes its global warming predictions in the AR5 final draft

Aside from being very late to the party, that's very odd for a couple of reasons.  First it implies that Christopher Monckton was hoping for a "talking" book from the IPCC.  Maybe so he could listen when he's on the train or maybe because his eyesight is failing.  Could someone tell Christopher that there are software programs around that will read text aloud.  All he needs is a computer with speakers or headphones and he can hear the sounds.

Secondly, Christopher can't have read the report properly if he thinks that global warming predictions have been "slashed".  Here is how Ed Hawkins responded:

@latimeralder @wattsupwiththat (1) This is the first 'prediction' the IPCC has made. (2) Observations within range of previous projections.
— Ed Hawkins (@ed_hawkins) January 2, 2014

As Ed Hawkins explained rather clearly and well - oh, more than three months ago now (Christopher is also behind the times):

The AR5 includes, for the first time, a specific chapter and assessment on ‘near-term’ climate change, which covers the period up to 2050, but with a specific focus on the 2016-2035 period.

The near-term period is interesting because the projections can be verified rather soon and because understanding the changes over this period may be relevant for adaptation decision making. This period is also relatively insensitive to the particular emissions scenario, although aerosol emissions decline quite rapidly in all RCPs which may be slightly unrealistic. However, the near-term is made complicated because of the role of climate variability.

The IPCC has made a probabilistic assessment of how global temperatures are projected to evolve over the next 20 or so years, which is valid for all RCPs, but with a few caveats such as no future large volcanic eruptions.

To find out more about the short term estimates for global temperatures, I recommend Ed Hawkin's blog article.

Now Christopher rabbits on about "climbdowns" and "overestimates" which is nothing but wishful thinking on his part.  He persists in using monthly charts of global temperature so he can hide the signal in among the noise of weather.

It's going to get hotter

Regular readers will have seen the following charts more than once, but for those of you who are new to the subject, or those of you who've barely subsisted on a diet of denial up to now, here they are again:

It's going to get hotter if we don't do something about it.  For some unknown reason, Christopher Monckton believes that future temperatures have either stopped or will proceed at exactly the same rate as they have over some period in the past or something else.  It's never easy to work out just what the potty peer is trying to say.  At one stage he was pushing for David "funny sunny" Archibald's "ice age by 2020" prediction.

Australia has just broken multiple heat records, including 2013 being the hottest year on record.  Large parts of the country have been suffering another near record-breaking heat wave, with known hot regions recording near highs (almost 50 degrees at Moomba).  And it's not even been an El Nino year.  It's a long, long time since there has been a "coldest year on record" - probably for almost any region on Earth that has several decades of temperature records, and certainly for the world as a whole.

Many scientists have found through their research that if we don't cut emissions enough, Earth will rise by four degrees above the temperatures of the early twentieth century.  That will spell disaster for a lot of people.  Roger Bodman and David Karoly, for example, in a paper published in Nature Climate Change back in May last year found

...an increased probability of exceeding a 2 °C global–mean temperature increase by 2100 while reducing the probability of surpassing a 6 °C threshold for non-mitigation scenarios.

More recently, Steven Sherwood et al have just had a paper published in Nature about the behaviour of clouds in a warming world, and Steven discusses the implications:

"When the processes are correct in the climate models the level of climate sensitivity is far higher. Previously, estimates of the sensitivity of global temperature to a doubling of carbon dioxide ranged from 1.5°C to 5°C. This new research takes away the lower end of climate sensitivity estimates, meaning that global average temperatures will increase by 3°C to 5°C with a doubling of carbon dioxide."

The bottom line is that if we don't cut emissions of CO2 enough, the world will continue to heat up and that will pose a lot of big challenges to many people and in many fields of endeavour.  Not least of which will be fishing, agriculture, food production, infrastructure maintenance, liveability in many regions and general quality of life and its affordability.

People like poor old Christopher Monckton, who complains that the IPCC didn't provide a read-aloud version of its reports, and has forgotten that he first read the IPCC report months ago.  He was even an "expert reviewer" at one stage but I guess he's forgotten that little fact - or forgotten that he's already written ad nauseum about it.

Christopher can't read a chart

Christopher Monckton has quite a reputation for telling bald-faced lies.  For example, in only the second paragraph of his article at WUWT, Christopher writes:

Official projections of global warming have plummeted since Dr. James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies told the U.S. Congress in June 1988 the world would warm by 1 Cº every 20 years till 2050 (Fig. 1), implying 6 Cº to 2100.

I found nowhere in Dr Hansen's testimony any prediction or projection to 2050.  Nor could I find any example of his saying or even suggesting that the world will warm by one degree every twenty years.  Christopher put up this chart saying it was from Dr Hansen's testimony:

Source: WUWT

Which is similar to the actual chart from Dr Hansen's testimony, except Monckton's chart has the temperature in degree Kelvin for some strange reason and he's shifted around the labels.

Source: Hansen's 1988 testimony

If you look at the charts above, neither of them go to 2050. Nor do either of them, under any scenario, show a rise of one degree in twenty years.  Since 1960, Scenario A, which is the most extreme, shows a rise of almost 1.6 degrees to 2019. From 2000 to 2019, scenario A and B show a rise of around 0.7-0.8 degrees and nearly 0.6 degrees respectively.

Of course that's not to say that over the coming century the global temperatures won't rise more quickly in some decades, or more slowly in other decades.  The latest estimates suggest a rise of four degrees above temperatures in the early 1900s is quite on the cards by 2100 if we don't cut emissions enough.  And it will continue to rise after that as long as we're adding CO2 to the air in greater quantities than it's removed.

Here are the longer term projections for different choices we make about how much CO2 we will throw into the air.

Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 Summary for Policy Makers

Christopher's getting on in years like me, so he may not suffer too much.  So he can go gallivanting about complaining that he isn't allowed in the House of Lords and doesn't believe that Obama is President of the USA and that he's found a cure for AIDS and other crank ideas, like global warming isn't happening.  And Anthony Watts can promote as many crazies as he wants to on his anti-science blog.  It won't change a thing.

From the WUWT comments

GlynnMhor is a dinky di fake sceptic, not bothering to check any of Christopher's "claims".  He is one of the gullible dismissives, assuming he's witnessing the biggest hoax in human history - that all the thousands of scientists in the world who study various parts of Earth systems are "lying" and says:

January 1, 2014 at 6:01 pm
I generally tend to trust those recognized to be experts in their field, when they’re talking about their field, at least.

But once these ‘experts’ have been caught out in lie after lie after lie, their credibility in my mind declines markedly.

Janice Moore says (excerpt - okay, I'm having fun with the shouty god-botherer Janice):

January 1, 2014 at 6:55 pmHear, hear, Christopher Monckton. Well done! Thank you for the truth-in-science tour de force.

Damned out of their own mouths:...

...They must think we’re a bunch of morons.

Yep, Janice. For once you hit the nail on the head!

mib8 says innocently (excerpt):

January 1, 2014 at 10:42 pm
OK, folks, here’s something I don’t get in these graphs or some of the earlier ones. If there is a non-negative “anomaly” I’ve always understood it to mean that global warming is happening. Whether it is 0.001 degree or 0.1 degree or 0.9 degree or 2 degrees, it’s still “warming”....

...So, why do all of the graphs seem to show some global warming over the last 17-18 years, when several postings have said that the data show no global warming over that period? I’m not trying to be annoying; I just don’t understand.

M Courtney is another deluded denier that has no sense of time or just how fast is this change we are causing, and impatiently asks "are we there yet?":

January 2, 2014 at 12:49 am
It is worth noting that the rise in temperatures has never been considered catastrophic or even problematic.

It is the rate of rise in temperatures that was potentially disastrous.

So when does the expected change become so slow that we can adapt easily?
Probably when the effects of warming are slower than the natural wear-and-tear on infrastructure; we will adapt at no extra cost then.

Have we hit that point?

Richard Betts decides enough is enough and says:

January 2, 2014 at 3:28 am
How can something be “quietly cut” when it was only a draft in the first place?
Monckton makes it sound like the IPCC noisily made some predictions, and then secretly changed them afterwards, but this is the exact opposite of what really happened. The Second Order Draft was, as the name suggests, a draft. The IPCC specifically says that the earlier drafts are just preliminary, not the final conclusions, and indeed it asked authors and reviewers not to circulate the drafts specifically because it didn’t want people thinking that the draft conclusions were the final ones.

The drafts will be officially published later as a matter of public record, along with the review comments and author responses, so the evolution of the report will be clear.

This is a totally manufactured criticism.

Boris Gimbarzevsky does a grand imitation of a deluded denier (will someone call Poe?) and says:

January 2, 2014 at 5:21 am
I wouldn’t put it past the IPCC to suddenly announce that it had been wrong all along and that increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations causes global cooling. All it would take would be just changing the signs of a few variables in their models and quickly readjusting historical global temperature data to show it was warmer in the past.

Given the propensity for the majority of individuals to not remember what happened decades ago and believe what authority figures tell them, likely such a preposterous scheme would be noticed only by those who are suspicious by nature and question authority. With a mere flip of the presumed effects of CO2 on world temperature, suddenly the models would fit far better and would predict a new ice age in a century. The only question is whether people would accept the huge reductions in fossil fuel consumption which would be imperative to prevent the next ice age according to “experts”? While such a reversal of the IPCC’s position might seem far fetched, it is more plausible than Trenbeth’s “missing heat” and it appears that no theory is too implausible for this group of kleptocrats if it furthers the watermelon agenda of a deindustrialized world.