Guest Post by Bob Tisdale

It’s been months since I’ve wandered over to the ClimateProgress wing of the political blog ThinkProgress. The title of the November 4, 2014 blog post by alarmist Joe Romm is truly remarkable. Please sit. Put down your coffee, unless you want to spritz your keyboard. (I have a standby keyboard from my old computer just in case I run into something like this.) Here it comes, ready or not.

The title is IPCC Scientists Emphasize Immorality Of Inaction By Focusing On ‘Irreversible Impacts’.

Told ya’. It’s a doozy.

Odd thing, I don’t recall the IPCC being tasked with preparing reports about the ethics of hypothetical human-induced global warming and climate change. Do you? Referring to the IPCC History webpage, the IPCC I know was tasked with preparing reports that (my bold):

…assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy, although they may need to deal objectively with scientific, technical and socio-economic factors relevant to the application of particular policies.

If the IPCC is policy neutral, one might suspect it is also ethics neutral. In other words, it is not for the IPCC to decide what is moral or immoral.

Recall, the IPCC is only a report-writing arm of a political organization. They are not a scientific body. The reports are written for a political body—by like-minded scientists, granted—but they are prepared only to support that political body’s agendas.

On that IPCC History webpage, they also note:

The scientific evidence brought up by the first IPCC Assessment Report of 1990 underlined the importance of climate change as a challenge requiring international cooperation to tackle its consequences. It therefore played a decisive role in leading to the creation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the key international treaty to reduce global warming and cope with the consequences of climate change.

That’s also odd. The first IPCC assessment report wasn’t very conclusive. In fact, the IPCC admitted, at that time, they could not detect the impacts of manmade greenhouse gases on global mean surface temperatures. Yet somehow, the UNFCCC was created based on those inconclusive findings in the first IPCC report.

This has led many persons to conclude the UN was going to proceed with their agenda of stabilizing “greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” by creating regulations intended to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases…regardless of the findings of that first IPCC report. In other words, there was never any real need for the IPCC, never any real need for governments around the globe, since the founding of the purposeless IPCC in 1988, to continue to waste billions of dollars annually on climate studies. All of that time and money has been wasted. The politicians had already decided what they were going to do.

But I’ve gone off on a tangent. Back to Joe Romm’s IPCC Scientists Emphasize Immorality Of Inaction By Focusing On ‘Irreversible Impacts’.

The title of that post did its magic. I clicked on it.

It turns out that Romm performed an in-depth study on the use of the word “irreversible”, finding that it was used “only 4 times” in the IPCC’s full 4th synthesis report but used “31 times” in the IPCC’s new full 2014 synthesis report. To Joe Romm, the almost 8-fold increase in the use of one word in 100+ page documents was a clear message that “world’s leading scientists” were emphasizing the “immorality of inaction”.

Or it could indicate the politicians for whom the report is written have grown increasingly more frustrated with their own failures and have directed the report writers to ramp up the rhetoric.

Joe Romm then quoted portions of, possibly, a past synthesis report, and a 5-year-old NOAA study, and, assumedly, the recently released IPCC 2014 Synthesis Report, though I haven’t bothered to confirm the quotes or their sources. Then Romm proceeded to translate those quotes, all according to the Romm beliefs in the immoralities of failing to act on the computer-model projected impacts of hypothetical human-induced global warming, while failing to consider that those climate models cannot be falsified, because the models, purposely, are not representative of Earth’s climate.

I have no further comment about Romm’s post, but I’ll be happy to read yours.

Related:

Pierre Gosselin of NoTrickZone reports on “contradictions, falsehoods and distortions“ in the new IPCC Synthesis Report, which were discovered and documented by the Germany-based European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE). See Pierre’s post EIKE: IPCC Synthesis Report “In Crass Contradiction To Almost Every Measurement And Trend In Nature”.

Additionally, maybe you recall the blog post or news story from recent days. It was by a science reporter who had documented that many portions of the IPCC’s new synthesis report weren’t supported by their year-old 5th Assessment Report (AR5). If you have a link to the original article, please leave it for me in comments. I’d like to discuss it (introduce it) in this post as part of an update.

Thanks.

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