The climate intelligence group CLINTEL put out a statement today, “New IPCC Report Provides Little Objective Basis for Policymaking,” issued over the authorship of Guus Berkhout, President of CLINTEL (https://clintel.org) and Jim O’Brien, Irish CLINTEL ambassador, Chair of the Irish Climate Science Forum (ICSF) (www.ICSF.ie), which makes the following substantive points:
1. The Summary for Policymakers (SPM) seems to be exaggerating as in previous reports, and so provides little objective basis for policymaking.
2. The SPM seems to be ignoring that only last week IPCC circles admitted that their new AR6 generation of climate models are “overheated” and therefore too alarmist.
3. “Insanely Scary – and Wrong.” Independent observations had already indicated that CMIP5-models were too sensitive to greenhouse gas increases, probably by a factor of two. The combination of too high climate sensitivity and too high emissions projections resulted in implausibly high temperature forecasts. IPCC scientists themselves are beginning to doubt whether their models can be trusted as a policy instrument. “It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this admission,” Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told the renowned journal Science of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Schmidt also said, “You end up with numbers for even the near-term that are insanely scary—and wrong.”