New IPCC Report: Death and Destruction!

The IPCC’s latest report (Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability) and it’s full of observations and predictions of calamity is now available.

Just a scan of the news headlines reveals the catastrophe once again forecast by the IPCC: Climate change to leave no one on planet ‘untouched,’ IPCC chief, New Climate Change Report Warns of Dire Consequences, New U.N. Report: Climate Change Risks Destabilizing Human Society, Climate change a threat to security, food and humankind – IPCC report, Panel’s Warning on Climate Risk: Worst Is Yet to Come.

Ahh!

The IPCC may be full of gloom and doom, but not everyone is on board. Joseph Bast over at Forbes looked at the 8 main risks in the report that the IPCC listed as “reasons for concern.” He puts them alongside conclusions from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). Founded by atmospheric physicist Fred Singer, the NIPCC’s scientists assess global warming science and conduct independent reviews of the IPCC reports.

Just a few examples of the differences between the IPCC and NIPCC reports:

• Food insecurity? Yes, says the IPCC. Little or no risk, says the NIPCC.
• Severe harm for urban populations due to flooding? Yes, says the IPCC. No, says the NIPCC.
• Systemic risks due to extreme weather events? Yes, says the IPCC. There is no support that precipitation in a warmer world becomes more variable and intense, says the NIPCC.
• Risk of mortality, morbidity, and other harms? Yes, says the IPCC. No, says the NIPCC: Modest warming will actually result in a net reduction of human mortality.

The NIPCC reports are peer-reviewed, produced by scientists from 20 countries around the world, and cite thousands of peer-reviewed studies. The latest report is over 1,000 pages, and anyone can go online and view them.

Bast asks,

So is man-made global warming a crisis? Don’t just wonder about it, understand it yourself. Read one or a few chapters of one of the NIPCC reports, and ask if what you read is logical, factual, and relevant to the debate. See if the UN or its many apologists take into account the science and evidence NIPCC summarizes, and then decides whether its predictions ‘of death, injury, and disrupted livelihoods’ is science or fiction.

Matt Ridley over at the Wall Street Journal notes that the IPCC report predicts 70 percent more warming by the end of this century than the best science actually suggests. He then asks — what distinguishes the global warming “crisis” from the other crises we’ve been warned about in the past?

There remains a risk that the latest science is wrong and rapid warming will occur with disastrous consequences. And if renewable energy had proved by now to be cheap, clean and thrifty in its use of land, then we would be right to address that small risk of a large catastrophe by rushing to replace fossil fuels with first-generation wind, solar and bioenergy. But since these forms of energy have proved expensive, environmentally damaging and land-hungry, it appears that in our efforts to combat warming we may have been taking the economic equivalent of chemotherapy for a cold.

Almost every global environmental scare of the past half century proved exaggerated including the population “bomb,” pesticides, acid rain, the ozone hole, falling sperm counts, genetically engineered crops and killer bees. In every case, institutional scientists gained a lot of funding from the scare and then quietly converged on the view that the problem was much more moderate than the extreme voices had argued. Global warming is no different.

Are we really willing to transform our economies based on reports derived from faulty, ill-constructed models? Unless more people delve into these IPCC reports and look at the evidence presented by the NIPCC and others, we’re likely to do just that.

Print