IPCC report shows devil is in the detail for climate alarmists

Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Andrew Henshaw

The release of the latest UN climate change report last week makes three things clear about elite media coverage of the climate.

First, many journalists must not have read the report, which adds little by way of new data to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s previous assessment report, released in 2014.

As Graham Lloyd wrote in The Australian on Wednesday, IPCC 6 is a political document. Most environment writers will cite the report in the lead-up to the UN climate change conference in Glasgow in November, but it’s unlikely to stave off the failure most expect from that meeting.

Second, if journalists, the UN and politicians really believe the world can only meet its aim to limit warming to between 1.5C and 2C by accelerating 2030 Paris emissions-reduction targets, then they may as well give it away now. Why? The developed world is already reducing emissions, so all of the rise in man-made CO2 output is coming from the developing world, and particularly from the highest and third-highest emitters, China and India. Since both are refusing to commit to reducing emissions by 2030, the Paris Accord effectively concedes emissions will still be rising in 2030.

Third, while the world’s financiers may – as Paul Kelly argued in this newspaper last week – make it impossible for a country such as Australia to resist pressure to increase its climate ambition, there remains in most democracies the problem of voter hesitancy. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and US President Joe Biden are fast learning the limits of voter tolerance about paying for climate action.

The EU faces resistance from Poland and Hungary to ambitious commitments by nuclear-dependent France and the wealthy Germans. As the UK Daily Mail expressed it on August 11: “If Boris thinks Brits are going to pay through the nose for green boilers and electric cars while the Chinese are burning coal like there’s no tomorrow he’s signing his own death warrant.”

Indeed, while journalists at the ABC and the Nine newspapers scoff at Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce on the issue of policies to meet “net zero by 2050”, Joyce may just have a better idea than them about how voters not cosseted in high-paying jobs in the inner cities will feel about destroying their lifestyles while advancing the lifestyles of Indian and Chinese citizens.

Back to point one. On the ABC’s RN Mornings on Tuesday, self-confessed activist journalist Fran Kelly allowed Greens leader Adam Bandt to spout propaganda about IPCC 6 without really challenging his understanding of the report. Bandt claimed Australia needed to follow what Johnson and Biden “have done” in the UK and US on net zero by 2050. Apart from talk, Johnson and Biden have done zip. Johnson has just abandoned his singular heat pump policy for domestic users and Biden is presiding over record gas and oil exploration and exports. Perhaps for Bandt, talking is acting.

Bandt claimed Australia is allowing its CO2 emissions to rise. In fact, it is ahead of most countries in emissions reduction, and is ahead of its Paris Agreement target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Sky News presenter Andrew Bolt. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

Bandt wants us to commit to a 75 per cent reduction for 2030. Asked by Kelly about China and India he refused to concede global CO2 emissions cannot be reduced without increased commitments from China and India. He said Australia could not ask other countries to do what it is not prepared to do, and claimed Australia is lagging on renewables. The numbers show Australia is a leader on wind, rooftop solar and solar farms.

“Scott Morrison is putting Australian lives at risk with his 2030 death sentence targets,” Bandt claimed. Yet 2021 is to date one of the coolest years since 2000, largely because of a strong La Nina phenomenon.

Here’s a fact this newspaper has been emphasising for two decades: Man-made climate variability in the short term is dwarfed by natural changes to climate.

Over-reaction and hype dominated IPCC 6 coverage across the ABC, the Nine newspapers and Guardian Australia. Yet all virtually ignored what was a substantive and new climate science development only a week earlier.

In The Australian on July 30, Lloyd reported a stunning admission from some of the world’s leading climate scientists – revealed in the prestigious journal Science – that the models used to predict global temperature rises are coming up with higher numbers than temperatures in the real world. Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said: “It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this (admission the models are over-estimating warming).”

The article in Science stated: “Many of the world’s leading models are now projecting warming rates that most scientists, including the model makers themselves, believe are implausibly fast.”

Lloyd’s piece concluded with a quote by Australian geophysicist and IPCC 6 reviewer Michael Asten describing the Science report as a “significant concession”. Asten spoke to Andrew Bolt on Sky News on Tuesday night.

Asten, former professor at Monash University’s School of Earth Atmosphere and Environment, criticised the report’s failure to discuss differences between the models and real world measurements, and rejected the way the report cherrypicks small time periods to find accelerated warming. He observed other parts of the same report emphasise that only changes over 30-year periods should be considered because of the climate’s natural short-term variability.

“There is a discrepancy between models and observational studies. And that’s been obvious since the year 2000. It’s even clearer now in 2021. The only surprise to me is that it’s taken so long for the establishment to admit there is a problem,” Asten said.

“In 2021 … the global temperature has decreased to the same value it was 15 years ago. The report ignores this. I argue this is a significant flaw in logic.”

On Sky News and in the News Corp tabloids, Bolt pointed out that despite overheated media claims the IPCC report expresses “low confidence” about human influence on meteorological droughts, and says it is a challenge to identify any trends with tornadoes and cyclones – which it nevertheless expects to be more severe.

It does expect more agricultural droughts, both overseas and in Australia. It has “low confidence” forecasting flood trends, but does expect more heavy rain.

It admits higher CO2 levels are greening the planet. It expects more fires, even though NASA satellite data shows land burnt annually is falling. It expects more hot days.

Lloyd on Wednesday nailed how political IPCC 6 is: “Analysis shows the high-emissions scenarios that the IPCC says have a low probability dominate the report, with 41.5 per cent of all scenario mentions. The scenarios judged most likely … get less than half of this amount.”

Asten took the rational approach to over-hyped reporting: “The world has already warmed 1.1 degrees since 170 years ago and the world’s a nicer place … 170 years ago was a little ice age. If we warm another 0.4 of a degree I don’t see that is a problem and, no, I am not frightened.”