In the nine years I’ve been doing this blog, I’ve quoted from Sam Carana of Arctic Methane Emergency Group a number of times. He’s been a source for climate information that can’t be found in mainstream media. I’m bringing his reporting to your attention because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released its Sixth Assessment. The news is bad enough–the reporting says we’re in a RED ZONE whereby immediate action is called for. But they’ve lied to us about where the temperature is now. I put this in my blog in February 2020.

And yet, the IPCC is still pretending we aren’t at even 1.5 C let alone 2. This from CNBC:

The world’s leading climate scientists on Monday delivered their starkest warning yet about the deepening climate emergency, with some of the changes already set in motion thought to be “irreversible” for centuries to come.

A highly anticipated report by the U.N.’s climate panel warns that limiting global warming to close to 1.5 degrees Celsius or even 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels “will be beyond reach” in the next two decades without immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Here’s the news from Sam Carana about the IPCC Sixth Assessment:

from a preliminary report on August 9, 2021:

IPCC REPORT: BASELINE STRUGGLE

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just released a new report, the Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). When reading the report, the question comes up: Is the IPCC seeking to downplay the dire situation we’re in, again? One of the first issues that comes up is the baseline. The IPCC selects 1850–1900 as a baseline, as it did before (in SR1.5). This isn’t pre-industrial. The Paris Agreement calls for pre-industrial as a base.

During 1850 to 1900, more livestock, forest clearing and wood burning resulted in growth in emissions of black carbon, brown carbon, dust, methane and carbon monoxide, which all can temporarily drive up temperatures. Additionally, there was little impact yet of the sulfur aerosols associated with increased fossil fuel burning from 1900. Trends drawn from this base can therefore look flatter than they would have looked if drawn from a genuinely pre-industrial base, or even from the early 1900s as base. The IPCC appears to say that there is only a 50% chance that 1.5°C will be crossed by 2030. Is this a deliberate effort to create the perception that there was enough carbon budget left to be divided among polluters, to let them comfortably keep adding further pollution for another decade or more?

Instead, the IPCC could have concluded that there hasn’t been a carbon budget for a long time and that there are indications that the 1.5°C threshold has long been crossed. When calculating the temperature rise through 2020 and going back one century, NASA data show a 1.29°C rise from 1920, which is a conservative figure, i.e. 0.1°C can be added to translate NASA’s sea surface temperatures into ocean air temperatures and another 0.1°C can be added for higher polar anomalies. So, that already brings the temperature rise up to about 1.5°C and this isn’t the full rise from pre-industrial by a long shot.

The IPCC does mention that from 1750 to 1850–1900 there was a global surface temperature rise of up to 0.3°C, but then excludes this rise, sticking to its selection of 1850-1900 as base. The IPCC also uses seasonally-biased data for the temperature rise before 1750, making it look as if temperatures didn’t rise before 1750, whereas it makes sense to add a 0.29C rise for the period from 3480 BC to 1520, and a further 0.2°C for 1520 to 1750.

Adding up the different elements thus gives a total rise from pre-industrial that could be as high as 1.29°C + 0.1°C + 0.1°C + 0.3°C + 0.2°C + 0.29°C = 2.28°C. Related Data here: https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/pre-industrial.html

So to explain: The IPCC has ‘moved the chains’ on when warming started and has ignored the earlier warming that began when the Industrial Revolution began. We’re already at or above 2 C by the way we used to measure global average temperatures. But if you SAY that, the politicians (who largely put this report together after the scientists are through) would get a raft of SH*T from their constituents. And they’d have to resort to even more radical changes to the world economy in order to prevent mass extinction.

The joke comes to mind: leader of Authoritarian Third world country comes to the podium: “My People! I Have Good News and Bad news!”

“Bad news first! we’ve had a massive crop failure! Everything that grows has died due to global warming!There’s nothing left to eat but slimy jungle lizards!”

“Now the Good News– we don’t have enough slimy Jungle Lizards to go around!!!”

Seriously, we’re already experiencing the worst case temperature rise. Such heat will not only interfere with growing season of staple crops like Wheat and Corn. It will also speed the melting of the Arctic summer ice and probable release of gigatons of methane, a far more deadly gas than CO2 when it comes to Greenhouse Effect.

I thank Sam Carana (whoever he is) for this information.