Submissions to Government IPCC inquiry

The deadline for written submissions to the  IPCC 5th Assessment Review by the Energy and Climate Change Committee (mentioned in an earlier post) has now passed.

The submissions will probably  be posted eventually  on the inquiry website, but some have already appeared.

Richard Tol’s submission is quite short, saying that nothing much has changed since AR4 in the report, and that emissions reductions targets are a bad idea.

Mike Haseler (former Green party member turned sceptic) has posted his submission, which is much longer. I am not sure about the wisdom of referring to Star Trek in the first paragraph, but he criticises climate models for their failure to model natural variability  or  to match reality, particularly in regard to the early and late 20th century warming. (Figure 10.1 in  IPCC chapter 10 shows this  – the models don’t get the 1900-1940s warming).

My submission is quite brief and just summarises a few of the points already made on this blog – the dodgy 95% claim, the reality of decreased confidence and the spin in data presentation.

Any others? Please post links in comments.

Update: Marcel Krok has posted his submission. It discusses decreasing estimates of climate sensitivity estimates, the warming pause and the model/observations divergence.

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WG1 co-chair Thomas Stocker abandons IPCC principles

Thomas Stocker, the co-chair of IPCC WG1, has been discussed previously on this blog.

On 26th November he gave a talk at Imperial College on the messages from the AR5 WG1 report. The headline of the write-up is

“Act now to limit climate change says climate expert at Grantham Annual Lecture”

and it ends with

“Professor Stocker finished his talk with the message that the international community has to act now and that any further delay in reducing emissions could close the door on limiting global mean warming, and consequent impacts, permanently.”

Perhaps he needs to be reminded of the principles of the IPCC:

“Because of its scientific and intergovernmental nature, the IPCC embodies a unique opportunity to provide rigorous and balanced scientific information to decision makers. By endorsing the IPCC reports, governments acknowledge the authority of their scientific content. The work of the organization is therefore policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive.”