Friday, August 13, 2021

The New IPCC Report Is Out

What I wanted to do on Wednesday (when I came down with an odd little sickness) was write the definitive debunking of the IPCC AR6 report that was released on Monday and has been making news this week.  I failed at that because I'm not as far along at a starting point as many other people.  There's too much to read and digest in a couple of days.  Lots of people with big head starts on me have already done much of that heavy lifting.  In a bit of reading around, you can get a good idea of the things wrong with it, if you read the right sources. 

Some good sources are

The report was greeted with media adopting, "Red Flag Warning" and similar strident language.  I don't think it's justified.

Since we're nearing the peak of hurricane season, a tropical storm will pass to our west by Sunday and another is behind it by three or four days following a similar track, the way the paper addresses hurricanes was something I'm sensitive to.  There's a subtle mistake (very likely) here that Roger Pielke spotted since he's the author of one of the papers:

I don't mean to be trite but one of the most downloaded papers in history says most published papers are wrong.  In that paper, John Ioannidis presents a list of factors that are associated with results being wrong.  This one seems to be custom written for IPCC papers.

Corollary 6: The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true.

This is one of them.  

 


2 comments:

  1. I read and re-read the last section, particularly the highlighted fragments. I must be missing something important.
    A. Grinsted, et al are stating that although the data "shows no increase in the frequency of U.S. land fall events" there has been "an increasing trend in U.S. hurricane damage..."
    Without getting deeply into sadistics, this tells me that the number of structures (impacted by the hurricanes) and/or their cost have been increasing since 1900.
    Mis-reading these data is a common occurrence for those who never learned to read research papers - or am I missing the point entirely?

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    1. I think you're exactly right. That's one of their points.

      It's not only that, though. Not only have more people moved closer to the coasts so that more property can be damaged, the continuous devaluation of the dollar by over 100 years of the Federal Reserve has an effect. If you had identical amounts of structure damage 50 years ago and now, it would cost far more now simply because the dollar is worth less.

      And that's not even considering the storms that get named now that wouldn't have even been known about before weather satellites.

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