Full AR5 draft leaked here, contains game-changing admission of enhanced solar forcing

Posted by Alec Rawls, 12/13/12

I participated in "expert review" of the Second Order Draft of AR5 (the next IPCC report), Working Group 1 ("The Scientific Basis"), and am now making the full draft available to the public. I believe that the leaking of this draft is entirely legal, that the taxpayer funded report is properly in the public domain under the Freedom of Information Act, and that making it available to the public is in any case protected by established legal and ethical standards, but web hosting companies are not in the business of making such determinations so interested readers are encouraged to please download copies of the report for further dissemination in case this content is removed as a possible terms-of-service violation. My reasons for leaking the report are explained below. Here are the chapters:

Summary for Policymakers

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Observations: Atmosphere and Surface

Chapter 3: Observations: Ocean

Chapter 4: Observations: Cryosphere

Chapter 5: Information from Paleoclimate Archives

Chapter 6: Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles

Chapter 7: Clouds and Aerosols

Chapter 8: Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing

Chapter 8 Supplement

Chapter 9: Evaluation of Climate Models

Chapter 10: Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional

Chapter 11: Near-term Climate Change: Projections and Predictability

Chapter 12: Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility

Chapter 13: Sea Level Change

Chapter 14: Climate Phenomena and their Relevance for Future Regional Climate Change

Chapter 14 Supplement

Technical Summary

Why leak the draft report?

By Alec Rawls (email)

General principles

The ethics of leaking tax-payer funded documents requires weighing the "public's right to know" against any harm to the public interest that may result. The press often leaks even in the face of extreme such harm, as when the New York Times published details of how the Bush administration was tracking terrorist financing with the help of the private sector Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), causing this very successful anti-terror program to immediately collapse.

That was a bad leak, doing great harm to expose something that nobody needed to know about. With the UN's IPCC reports the calculus is reversed. UN "climate chief" Christina Figueres explains what is at stake for the public:

... we are inspiring government, private sector, and civil society to [make] the biggest transformation that they have ever undertaken. The Industrial Revolution was also a transformation, but it wasn’t a guided transformation from a centralized policy perspective. This is a centralized transformation that is taking place because governments have decided that they need to listen to science.

So may we please see this "science" on the basis of which our existing energy infrastructure is to be ripped out in favor of non-existent "green" energy? The only reason for secrecy in the first place is to enhance the UN's political control over a scientific story line that is aimed explicitly at policy makers. Thus the drafts ought to fall within the reach of the Freedom of Information Act.

The Obama administration implicitly acknowledged this when it tried to evade FOIA by setting up private "backdoor channels" for communications with the IPCC. If NCAR's Gerald Meehl (a lead author of AR5's chapter on near-term climate change), has working copies of the draft report (and he's only one of dozens of U.S. government researchers who would), then by law the draft report (now finished) should be available to the public.

The IPCC's official reason for wanting secrecy (as they explained it to Steve McIntyre in January 2012) is so that criticisms of the drafts are not spread out across the internet but get funneled through the UN's comment process. If there is any merit to that rationale it is now moot. The comment period ended November 30th so the comment process can no longer be affected by publication.

As for my personal confidentiality agreement with the IPCC, I regard that as vitiated by the systematic dishonesty of the report ("omitted variable fraud" as I called it in my FOD comments). This is a general principle of journalistic confidentiality: bad faith on one side breaks the agreement on the other. They can't ask reviewers to become complicit in their dishonesty by remaining silent about it.

Then there is the specific content of the Second Order Draft where the addition of one single sentence demands the release of the whole. That sentence is an astounding bit of honesty, a killing admission that completely undercuts the main premise and the main conclusion of the full report, revealing the fundamental dishonesty of the whole.

Lead story from the Second Order Draft: strong evidence for solar forcing beyond TSI now acknowledged by IPCC

Compared to the First Order Draft, the SOD now adds the following sentence, indicated in bold (page 7-43, lines 1-5, emphasis added):

Many empirical relationships have been reported between GCR or cosmogenic isotope archives and some aspects of the climate system (e.g., Bond et al., 2001; Dengel et al., 2009; Ram and Stolz, 1999). The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link. We focus here on observed relationships between GCR and aerosol and cloud properties.

The Chapter 7 authors are admitting strong evidence ("many empirical relationships") for enhanced solar forcing (forcing beyond total solar irradiance, or TSI), even if they don't know what the mechanism is. This directly undercuts the main premise of the report, as stated in Chapter 8 (page 8-4, lines 54-57):

There is very high confidence that natural forcing is a small fraction of the anthropogenic forcing. In particular, over the past three decades (since 1980), robust evidence from satellite observations of the TSI and volcanic aerosols demonstrate a near-zero (–0.04 W m–2) change in the natural forcing compared to the anthropogenic AF increase of ~1.0 ± 0.3 W m–2.

The Chapter 8 authors (a different group than the Chapter 7 authors) are explicit here that their claim about natural forcing being small compared to anthropogenic forcing is based on an analysis in which the only solar forcing that is taken into account is TSI. This can be verified from the radiative forcing table on page 8-39 where the only solar variable included in the IPCC's computer models is seen to be "solar irradiance."

This analysis, where post-1980 warming gets attributed to the human release of CO2 on the grounds that it cannot be attributed to solar irradiance, cannot stand in the face of the Chapter 7 admission of substantial evidence for solar forcing beyond solar irradiance. Once the evidence for enhanced solar forcing is taken into account we can have no confidence that natural forcing is small compared to anthropogenic forcing.

The Chapter 8 premise that natural forcing is relatively small leads directly to the main conclusion of the entire report, stated in the first sentence of the Executive Summary (the very first sentence of the entire report): that advances since AR4 "further strengthen the basis for human activities being the primary driver in climate change" (p.1-2, lines 3-5). This headline conclusion is a direct descendant of the assumption that the only solar forcing is TSI, a claim that their own report no longer accepts.

The report still barely hints at the mountain of evidence for enhanced solar forcing, or the magnitude of the evidenced effect. Dozens of studies (section two here) have found between a .4 and .7 degree of correlation between solar activity and various climate indices, suggesting that solar activity "explains" in the statistical sense something like half of all past temperature change, very little of which could be explained by the very slight variation in TSI. At least the Chapter 7 team is now being explicit about what this evidence means: that some mechanism of enhanced solar forcing must be at work.

My full submitted comments (which I will post later) elaborate several important points. For instance, note that the Chapter 8 premise (page 8-4, lines 54-57) assumes that it is the change in the level of forcing since 1980, not the level of forcing, that would be causing warming. Solar activity was at historically high levels at least through the end of solar cycle 22 (1996), yet the IPCC is assuming that because this high level of solar forcing was roughly constant from 1950 until it fell off during solar cycle 23 it could not have caused post-1980 warming. In effect they are claiming that you can't heat a pot of water by turning the burner to maximum and leaving it there, that you have to keep turning the flame up to get continued warming, an un-scientific absurdity that I have been writing about for several years (most recently in my post about Isaac Held's bogus 2-box model of ocean equilibration).

The admission of strong evidence for enhanced solar forcing changes everything. The climate alarmists can't continue to claim that warming was almost entirely due to human activity over a period when solar warming effects, now acknowledged to be important, were at a maximum. The final draft of AR5 WG1 is not scheduled to be released for another year but the public needs to know now how the main premises and conclusions of the IPCC story line have been undercut by the IPCC itself.

President Obama is already pushing a carbon tax premised on the fear that CO2 is causing dangerous global warming. Last week his people were at the UN's climate meeting in Doha pretending that Hurricane Sandy was caused by human increments to CO2 as UN insiders assured the public that the next IPCC report will "scare the wits out of everyone" with its ramped-up predictions of human-caused global warming to come, but this is not where the evidence points, not if climate change is in any substantial measure driven by the sun, which has now gone quiet and is exerting what influence it has in the cooling direction.

The acknowledgement of strong evidence for enhanced solar forcing should upend the IPCC's entire agenda. The easiest way for the UN to handle this disruptive admission would be to remove it from their final draft, which is another reason to make the draft report public now. The devastating admission needs to be known so that the IPCC can't quietly take it back.

Will some press organization please host the leaked report?

Most of us have to worry about staying within cautiously written and cautiously applied terms-of-service agreements. That's why I created this new website. If it gets taken down nothing else gets taken with it. Media companies don't have this problem. They have their own servers and publishing things like the draft IPCC report is supposed to be their bailiwick.

If the press has First Amendment protection for the publication of leaked materials even when substantial national security interests are at stake (the Supreme Court precedent set in the Pentagon Papers case), then it can certainly republish a leaked draft of a climate science report where there is no public interest in secrecy. The leaker could be at risk (the case against Pentagon leaker Daniel Ellsberg was thrown out for government misconduct, not because his activity was found to be protected) but the press is safe, and their services would be appreciated.

United States taxpayers have funded climate science to the tune of well over 80 billion dollars, all channeled through the funding bureaucracy established by Vice President Albert "the end is nigh" Gore when he served as President Clinton's "climate czar." That Gore-built bureaucracy is still to this day striving to insure that not a penny of all those taxpayer billions ever goes to any researcher who is not committed to the premature conclusion that human contributions to atmospheric CO2 are causing dangerous global warming (despite the lack of any statistically significant warming for more than 15 years).

Acolytes of this bought "consensus" want to see what new propaganda their tax dollars have wrought and so do the skeptics. It's unanimous, and an already twice-vetted draft is sitting now in thousands of government offices around the world. Time to fork it over to the people.

Alec Rawls

Palo Alto, California

Reactions to the leak

I am an occasional co-blogger at Anthony Watts' climate skeptic website, Watts Up With That. Shortly after I posted the leak here Anthony copied the leak to his website as well and, over the next couple of days, provided numerous links to reactions from climate scientists, journalists and the blogosphere.

From WUWT:

IPCC AR5 draft leaked, contains game-changing admission of enhanced solar forcing

Worldwide reactions to the IPCC AR5 leak

Quote of the week – Dr. Judith Curry on the AR5 Draft leak

Rebuttals

Two prominent IPCC authors (Steven Sherwood and Joanna Haigh) came out to rebut my claims about the importance of the admission of strong evidence for some substantial mechanism of solar amplification. Another prominant rebuttal came from Dana Nucitelli at the "consensus" sanctioned website Credulous Science Skeptical Science. Below are my rebuttals to these rebuttals. Since Sherwood is Australian, the first is a team-up with Aussie journalist Joanne Nova:

Alec Rawls responds to Steven Sherwood: “The professor is inverting the scientific method”

Haigh Anxiety: a psycho-comedy of errors

Dana Nuccitelli’s holiday trick for sobering up quick: put a little less rum in your egg nog

Other related posts of mine

My submitted "expert review" comments on the First Order Draft of AR5 (February 2012):

Omitted variable fraud: vast evidence for solar climate driver rates one oblique sentence in AR5

My detailed responses to the rapid-ocean-equilibrium assumptions that many climatologists use to dismiss a solar explanation for late 20th century warming:

Solar warming and ocean equilibrium, Part 3: Solanki and Schuessler respond

Isaac Held's 2-box model: another ocean-equilibration excuse for dismissing solar warming bites the dust

And my most recent follow up:

Commitment studies belie "consensus" claim that a persistent high level of temperature forcing cannot cause continued warming

My other websites

My personal blog is Error Theory: "Moral science has two halves. There are the implications of thinking straight about fact and value (ideal theory) and there are the implications of not thinking straight. Ideal theory is the foundation, error theory the daily battle."

My Rawls.org website ("A Republican Form of Government") has a couple of very important essays: how to protect liberty directly rather than indirectly (which we currently do by tying the hands of the police); and how to vastly improve the accuracy and efficiency of our system of criminal justice by having juries hand down multiple verdicts on multiple standards of guilt.

The Rawls.org site also contains my 2003 appeal to the Supreme Court over the California law that limits candidates for Sheriff (a top executive officer, independent of governor and president) to members of the incumbent regime, making it impossible to throw the bums out, in violation of the Article IV Section 4 guarantee to the states that they shall have "a republican form of government." ("The true principle of republicanism," according to Alexander Hamilton, is "that the people should choose whom they please to govern them.")

The republican guarantee has been thought by many Supreme Court justices to be non-justiciable, but only because all previous suits on this grounds raised "political question" conflicts. My suit did not and should have been the vehicle for rescuing the guarantee clause from its present state of constitutional duesetude (which violates Justice Marshall's dictum that constitutional provisions are not to be held impotent "unless the words require it").

The bottom of the home page of my Rawls.org site recreates my old Rawls For Sheriff website. What could have been. Amongst other things, this older site collects many of my old Stanford Review articles and some old Thinker articles, like my Mr. Knowitall columns.

My Crescent of Betrayal website exposes the numerous Islamic design features in what was originally called the Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93. Yes, it really is true that a person standing between the tips of the half-mile wide Islamic-shaped crescent and facing into the center of the crescent will be facing almost exactly at Mecca, and you can verify it for yourself in about 2 minutes. Just print out a graphic of the Crescent design and place it over an online mecca direction calculator on your computer screen, with the calculator set to Somerset PA. Links here.

These calculators are used by Muslims to find the direction they are supposed to pray from their present zip code. You will see that the Mecca direction line almost exactly bisects the crescent. What is the religious significance of a crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca? I'm betting you can guess.

For several years I have been working with Tom Burnett Senior, father of Flight 93 hero Tom Burnett Junior, to try to get this abomination stopped. Someday, once the nation has managed to free itself from domination by media elites who systematically suppress whatever information they perceive to be harmful to the left, architect Paul Murdoch's terrorist memorial mosque WILL be removed from that hallowed ground.

Miscellaneous

A random specimen of John Cook's crowd-sourced survey of the peer-reviewed global-warming literature, used to assess degree to which the literature conforms "consensus" views. My post about Cook's survey here (link to be added).