IPCC AR5 not acknowledging cosmoclimatology

In a few years, the IPCC climate panel plans to release the fifth assessment report, AR5. Alec Rawls (firstname at lastname dot org) has leaked the current draft (he thinks it's 100% legal to do so) and he, much like other skeptics, seemed to be enthusiastic about the IPCC's finally admitting the existence of natural climate drivers, especially those related to the Sun.

Dana Nuccitelli, a notorious climate demagogue and fearmonger writing for Skeptical Science.com, wrote a guest blog for the Guardian blogs where he claims that the IPCC isn't saying anything of the sort even though he thinks it's possible to determine what the IPCC is saying by not looking in the IPCC draft at all – it's enough to look in some pet pro-alarmist maximally anthropogenic papers of himself, he thinks. The Earth isn't spinning, it's just the human hot air that matters. Is that really to hard for you, Mr Nuccitelli, to figure out that by your ostrich methodology, you simply can't determine what the IPCC AR5 draft is admitting and what is not?

I was agnostic about both claims but now I see that Rawls is surely having a point but my excitement is much weaker than his. In fact, I would say that not much is changing in the IPCC.




The WUWT article offers download links for the draft; search for "peeje" on that page. After some limited time I spent by looking at the documents, I believe that the Chapter 7 on clouds and aerosols is the "most powerful endorsement" of the thesis that the Sun and the cosmic rays could be important for the climate – via their effect on the clouds. But as I will argue below, the "most powerful endorsement" still means that it's not an endorsement at all.

If you click at the link above and then "create a download link" and "click here to download", you will get a PDF document. So how much of cosmoclimatology has been incorporated into these summaries of literature? Look for Svensmark, for example – that's quite an important name here. You will find it at 8 places in the chapter. Only 3 of them appear in the main text; 5 are in the literature.

All the 3 appearances of the word "Svensmark" are followed by remarks that his or their results haven't been proved to be robust; haven't been corroborated; and Kirkby showed that the contribution of those mechanisms to the relevant climate change questions is negligible. I think it's an extremely biased summary of the findings in the literature but that's not the main point I want to argue about here.

My main point is that it doesn't seem to me that this chapter has concluded that cosmoclimatology is important.

Rawls mentions one more quote, "Many empirical relationships have been reported between GCR or cosmogenic isotope archives and some aspects of the climate system..." That's nice but the text continues and the continuation is trying, quite universally, to dismiss the results with the the modest negative evidence in the literature and some general, vague claims that those results are not robust, they're not reproduced, and so on.

Quite generally, you can say that if there are many papers making an alarmist point, the "right" interpretation is that these papers corroborate each other. If there are many papers showing empirical relationships between some climatic time series and the galactic cosmic rays, it means that these many papers haven't been corroborated by anything else. The fact that the pieces of evidence are numerous, observational as well as lab-based, experimental as well as theoretical (mechanism is known), doesn't seem to matter for the conclusion.

It's clearly the same biased attitude we would expect from the previous IPCC reviews. Perhaps Svensmark et al. may be pronounced now as they have lost their "taboo" status but the draft is still closer to a dirty alarmist propaganda than to a proper scientific evaluation of the literature and if I were asked for a recommendation, I would still recommend a life in prison for all the people who participate on this IPCC monstrosity.

Chapter 8 makes these things even worse. It claims that the dominant man-made explanation not only survived but has strengthened and it completely ignores the investigation in Chapter 7 when it assumes that the Sun may at most influence us by the total irradiance and that's negligible – no amplifying mechanisms are allowed to be even considered, as far as Chapter 8 goes. Yes, the folks behind Chapter 8 deserve a somewhat harsher punishment than the life in prison.

I am not saying that I can prove that cosmoclimatology is the most important thing; but what I can prove is that the same situation in the literature is evaluated very differently depending on whether the conclusions are convenient or not. And the Sun and cosmic rays are probably still better than other natural drivers and potential explanations – oceans and just accumulated random weather – whose existence and contribution isn't admitted by the draft at all.

The situation, as I see it, is that the IPCC writing process is still controlled purely by the staunch, stubborn alarmists. They may have just split into several camps that differ in the opinion whether it should be legal to pronounce the name of Henrik Svensmark, albeit with a negative sentence required immediately afterwords, or whether his name should remain a blasphemy. I am not too interested in these sectarian divisions of these loons and liars – for me, all of them are still the same scum, whether or not they successfully execute the members of the opposite sect.

And that's the memo.

Shooting in Connecticut

It's insane. Dozens of children and other people (at least 27 casualties in total, including the principal, the psychologist, and – most disgustingly – 18 children, hundreds of shots were heard; the murderer was most thrilled by shooting in the pre-school class) were shot in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. I only know Newton, Massachusetts. One lunatic (probably a 24-year-old father of a female student equipped with 4 guns and a vest: he was finally shot; or a 20-year-old student and Asperger sufferer Adam Lanza) and maybe two or three (very unlikely now) can kill almost as many people as Hurricane Sandy. One must see such things in the proper perspective. Even if people knew how to eliminate all hurricanes from the face of the Earth, that would be very far from preventing all tragic premature deaths.