IPCC Refuses Repeated Calls for Dialogue with Critical Scientists

by A. Blok, Apr 29, 2024 in Liberum


The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ignores crucial peer-reviewed literature and cherry-picks evidence to promote doom scenarios on climate change. These are just some of the findings of Climate Intelligence (Clintel) founder emeritus professor Guus Berkhout (84) after critically analyzing IPCC’s scientific reports. “They refuse my request for an honest and open debate. The result is a very one-sided, fear-mongering story.”

By Arthur Blok
In 1925, a group of internationally renowned scientists gathered in Haarlem at the invitation of the Royal Dutch Society of Sciences (KHMV), the Netherlands’ oldest scientific society. The scientists celebrated the golden doctorate of Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz, who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman.

Among its participants were Albert Einstein, Paul Ehrenfest, and Madame Curie, to name a few. Until today, the society holds annual meetings to promote science in its broadest sense, inviting the world’s most prominent to discuss, interpret, and share their findings. Since its inception in 1752, the KHMV has advocated that sharing knowledge is one of science’s core principles.

Berkhout and his Clintel—a global climate change and policy foundation—are loyal to that principle. Since 2019, they have taken the lead in speaking against the discourse of climate fear spread by politicians, movements, and the mainstream media. Berkhout even went as far as calling the so-called man-made climate emergency a hoax.

The Dutch emeritus professor has now targeted the IPCC and its members. The IPCC is a United Nations (UN) intergovernmental body that aims to advance scientific knowledge about climate change caused by human activities. Based on the research results, governmental policies should be designed and executed to stop climate change.

In the past year, Berkhout sent three personal letters expressing his worries to the IPCC chair, Professor Dr James Skea, but to no avail.

“I received only a small note from their secretariat saying they do not have the mandate to accept my proposal for cooperation. While the request in my first letter was strictly a request for debate and interaction, it was quite a remarkable reaction for a scientific panel”, he said.

Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory

by G. Schmidt, Mar 19, 2024 in Nature


Taking into account all known factors, the planet warmed 0.2 °C more last year than climate scientists expected. More and better data are urgently needed.

When I took over as the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I inherited a project that tracks temperature changes since 1880. Using this trove of data, I’ve made climate predictions at the start of every year since 2016. It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.

For the past nine months, mean land and sea surface temperatures have overshot previous records each month by up to 0.2 °C — a huge margin at the planetary scale. A general warming trend is expected because of rising greenhouse-gas emissions, but this sudden heat spike greatly exceeds predictions made by statistical climate models that rely on past observations. Many reasons for this discrepancy have been proposed but, as yet, no combination of them has been able to reconcile our theories with what has happened.

For a start, prevalent global climate conditions one year ago would have suggested that a spell of record-setting warmth was unlikely. Early last year, the tropical Pacific Ocean was coming out of a three-year period of La Niña, a climate phenomenon associated with the relative cooling of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. Drawing on precedents when similar conditions prevailed at the beginning of a year, several climate scientists, including me, put the odds of 2023 turning out to be a record warm year at just one in five.