Reason took the IPCC's "Sixth Assessment Report" to task for exaggeration — gloriously missing the point

11 August 2021

Introduction

What follows is divided into three parts.

I start by saying that Reason Magazine missed the point about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's most recent report.

Second, for general orientation, I explain what the IPCC's "Sixth Assessment" is and how, bureaucratically speaking, it is generated.

Third, I return to Reason Magazine's intelligently obtuse — and culturally indicative — take on the Sixth Assessment. The underlying lesson there being that:

We humans 'ain't gonna do nuthin'

'til we're simmering by the millions in (literal or metaphorical) fire

and

drowning by the hundreds of thousands in (not-so-figurative) high seas.

Of course, by Boiling Frog Time, it will probably be too late to substantially modify the planet's Homo sapiens torture plan.

I am not a Global Warming catastrophist . . .

But still, some people are too casual about the statistically probable climate predicament to come.

For instance, Reason just published a typically Establishment article that essentially supports maintaining the status quo. That well-written blurb says almost nothing notably intelligent or insightful about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest "Sixth Assessment".

The IPCC report is here

IPCC, Sixth Assessment Report — AR6 Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis, ipcc.ch (August 2021)

What is this "Sixth Assessment"?

According to the Intergovernmental Panel:

The IPCC is currently in its Sixth Assessment cycle, during which the IPCC will produce the Assessment reports of its three Working Groups, three Special Reports, a refinement to the methodology report and the Synthesis Report.

The Synthesis Report will be the last of the AR6 products, due for release in 2022.

The AR6 SYR is based on the content of the three Working Groups Assessment Reports:

WGI – The Physical Science Basis,

WGII – Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,

WGIII – Mitigation of Climate Change,

and the three Special Reports:

Global Warming of 1.5°C,

Climate Change and Land,

The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate.

AR6 SYR will be finalized in September 2022.

What are the IPCC's 'working groups'?

Those groups are arguably pertinent to our understanding of how this Global Warming 'stuff' is produced and propagated:

Working Group I

The IPCC Working Group I (WGI) aims at assessing the physical scientific basis of the climate system and climate change.

Working Group II

The IPCC Working Group II (WGII) assesses the vulnerability of socio-economic and natural systems to climate change, negative and positive.

Working Group III

The IPCC Working Group III (WG III) assesses options for mitigating climate change through limiting or preventing greenhouse gas emissions.

TFI

The Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories (TFI) was established by the IPCC to oversee the IPCC National Greenhouse.

What does the Sixth Assessment say?

The core of the report shows up in its "Summary for Policymakers". Thankfully, those points are further condensed in a separately located, "Headline Statements from the Summary for Policymakers".

The latter says, among other things, that:

Global surface temperature will continue to increase until at least the mid-century under all emissions scenarios considered. Global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C will be exceeded during the 21st century unless deep reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions occur in the coming decades.

Many changes in the climate system become larger in direct relation to increasing global warming.

They include increases in the frequency and intensity of hot extremes, marine heatwaves, and heavy precipitation, agricultural and ecological droughts in some regions, and proportion of intense tropical cyclones, as well as reductions in Arctic sea ice, snow cover and permafrost.

With further global warming, every region is projected to increasingly experience concurrent and multiple changes in climatic impact-drivers.

Changes in several climatic impact-drivers would be more widespread at 2°C compared to 1.5°C global warming and even more widespread and/or pronounced for higher warming levels.

Low-likelihood outcomes, such as ice sheet collapse, abrupt ocean circulation changes, some compound extreme events and warming substantially larger than the assessed very likely range of future warming cannot be ruled out and are part of risk assessment.

From a physical science perspective, limiting human-induced global warming to a specific level requires limiting cumulative CO2 emissions, reaching at least net zero CO2 emissions, along with strong reductions in other greenhouse gas emissions.

Strong, rapid and sustained reductions in CH4 emissions would also limit the warming effect resulting from declining aerosol pollution and would improve air quality.

The IPCC's blandly abbreviated and unprovocatively worded summary's weakness is that . . .

. . . we've heard it all before and done nothing with the information.

The observation — that 2°C is worse than 1.5°C — deserves the "well, duh" response that it will (actionlessly) receive.

I see nothing in the Sixth Assessment Report overview what would change humanity's current non-response to the Global Warming issue.

If we go on to the IPCC's less abbreviated "Summary for Policymakers" the problem of trying to communicate with non-scientists arises. The Summary suffers from the misfortune of being too scientifically pitched, in that it modifies everything that it says with semantic error bars.

Semantic error bars — if only our educational system worked properly

If you were politically inclined and had an axe to grind (from whichever political side) — what would you make of the semantic error bars that show up via the IPCC's own inserted italics:

The likely range of total human-caused global surface temperature increase from 1850–1900 to 2010–201911 is 0.8°C to 1.3°C, with a best estimate of 1.07°C.

It is likely that well-mixed GHGs contributed a warming of 1.0°C to 2.0°C, other human drivers (principally aerosols) contributed a cooling of 0.0°C to 0.8°C, natural drivers changed global surface temperature by –0.1°C to 0.1°C, and internal variability changed it by –0.2°C to 0.2°C.

It is very likely that well-mixed GHGs were the main driver12 of tropospheric warming since 1979, and extremely likely that human-caused stratospheric ozone depletion was the main driver of cooling of the lower stratosphere between 1979 and the mid-1990s.

Globally averaged precipitation over land has likely increased since 1950, with a faster rate of increase since the 1980s (medium confidence).

It is likely that human influence contributed to the pattern of observed precipitation changes since the mid-20th century, and extremely likely that human influence contributed to the pattern of observed changes in near-surface ocean salinity.

Mid-latitude storm tracks have likely shifted poleward in both hemispheres since the 1980s, with marked seasonality in trends (medium confidence).

For the Southern Hemisphere, human influence very likely contributed to the poleward shift of the closely related extratropical jet in austral summer.

Human influence is very likely the main driver of the global retreat of glaciers since the 1990s and the decrease in Arctic sea ice area between 1979–1988 and 2010–2019 (about 40% in September and about 10% in March).

There has been no significant trend in Antarctic sea ice area from 1979 to 2020 due to regionally opposing trends and large internal variability.

Human influence very likely contributed to the decrease in Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover since 1950.

It is very likely that human influence has contributed to the observed surface melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet over the past two decades, but there is only limited evidence, with medium agreement, of human influence on the Antarctic Ice Sheet mass loss.

It is virtually certain that the global upper ocean (0–700 m) has warmed since the 1970s and extremely likely that human influence is the main driver.

It is virtually certain that human-caused CO2 emissions are the main driver of current global acidification of the surface open ocean. There is high confidence that oxygen levels have dropped in many upper ocean regions since the mid-20th century, and medium confidence that human influence contributed to this drop.

Global mean sea level increased by 0.20 [0.15 to 0.25] m between 1901 and 2018. The average rate of sea level rise was 1.3 [0.6 to 2.1] mm yr–1 between 1901 and 1971, increasing to 1.9 [0.8 to 2.9] mm yr–1 between 1971 and 2006, and further increasing to 3.7 [3.2 to 4.2] mm yr–1 between 2006 and 2018 (high confidence). Human influence was very likely the main driver of these increases since at least 1971.

Changes in the land biosphere since 1970 are consistent with global warming: climate zones have shifted poleward in both hemispheres, and the growing season has on average lengthened by up to two days per decade since the 1950s in the Northern Hemisphere extratropics (high confidence).

The error range concept defies most people's understanding . . .

. . . simply because it refers to Reality's perpetual, difficult to penetrate ambiguity.

Humans, generally speaking, do not think (at least not accurately) in terms of probabilities and the statistical weights of evidence. This is, arguably, especially true for people who have difficulty understanding mathematics, as well as the interrelated complexities of dynamic systems.

Thus, from an action-motivating persuasiveness perspective, the IPCC summary arguably suffers from being too long, bland and overly precisely delivered. Those traits will encourage the Plutocratic Nitwits in Charge to ignore it for being, simultaneously, too far above (a) their levels of even basic scientific understanding and (b) divorced from their personal self-interest.

Not surprisingly, Reason fell victim to these human traits.

How Reason responded to the Sixth Assessment Report

Figuratively, we'll all be croaking in fire (my words) — but our situation will not be as bad as the IPCC thinks that it could become (his words) — announced Reason's science correspondent, Ronald Bailey:

The IPCC report outlines five different "shared socioeconomic pathways" (SSPs) that incorporate various assumptions about economic growth, population growth, and just how much greenhouse gas humanity will emit over the rest of the century.

The good news is that the two worst-case SSPs are totally implausible, so humanity is probably not looking at temperature increases of 3.5 °C to 4.5 °C by 2101.

[Bailey presents persuasive evidence to supports his above statement. He goes on to conclude that:]

Unabated man-made climate change would likely become a significant problem for humanity by the end of this century.

But the more plausible emissions scenarios suggest it is eminently possible to grow the world's economy while keeping global temperatures below catastrophic thresholds, by gradually transitioning from fossil fuels.

Hmmm, is magic involved?

Evidently, according to Ronald Bailey, we can dodge the Global Warming Death Bullet. And we can continue growing the world's economies — while (apparently magically) transitioning them away from fossil fuels — into an as-yet undescribed (and uninvented) mass transformation of humanity's existing energy base.

I have previously pointed out that the easily extracted, gargantuan energy quantities contained in fossil fuels far exceeds (by many orders of magnitude) those likely to become available from 'green' energy in the foreseeable future.

The technical and infrastructural problems facing a meaningful transition from assorted fossil fuels to (non-nuclear-sourced) green energies is much more daunting than Ronald Bailey too-optimistically gives it credit for.

Thus, from my perspective — and the scientific grounding that it is based on — Reason's Ronald Bailey is uncharacteristically doing a pretty good imitation of the Status Quo Establishment's mañana-oriented complacence.

Magic, he (probably inadvertently) implies, will save us. Or alternatively, we will happily adapt to Global Warming of the order of 1.5 to 2.0 degrees Celsius.

Adaption is certainly more likely than a massive Green Energy Revolution taking place soon enough to head off the brunt of what is likely. But getting to adaptation is going to be much more painful for the mass of humanity than Reason, Ronald Bailey and the Establishment pretend to think.

The moral? — I doubt that humanity's individually self-interested penchant for ignoring problems is going to see this one painlessly through

At least not without most of us experiencing significant onsets of widespread, large-scale disasters that make today's versions look comparatively small.

Catastrophe-skeptic though I generally am, I think pain (for many) is coming to Global Warming's pike. California's distressing fire, water and power situation is representative.

People who have never faced the survival problems posed by too-scarce resources have no idea what's on the horizon in many parts of the world. Including much of the United States.

PeteFree.com

Reason took the IPCC's "Sixth Assessment Report" to task for exaggeration — gloriously missing the point