Archives par mot-clé : IPPC

A Primer On The IPCC’s Implausible Climate Scenarios

by R. Pielke, Mar 17, 2023 in ClimateChangeDispatch


Next Monday the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release its so-called “Synthesis Report” which will integrate the findings of six different reports that it has released since 2014.

I have not participated in the IPCC nor have I seen the new report.

However, I have little doubt that one of the main issues that we will be discussing next week when the report is released will be the implausible climate scenarios that underpin much of the work of the IPCC over the past 9 years.[emphasis, links added]

Research I’ve been involved in — along with colleagues Matthew Burgess and Justin Ritchie — shows that theemissions scenarios that have guided the work of the IPCC and the broader climate research community are widely off the mark.

In short, they are far too extreme, both in what they project for today and especially into the future.

Our work is part of a growing consensus in the literature about the implausibility of extreme climate scenarios — a consensus so strong that it was acknowledged in the most recent IPCC assessmentreports, even though it complicated their messages.

The ubiquity of out-of-date scenarios throughout recent IPCC reports and the underlying literature that is has assessed means that the IPCC Synthesis Report, summarizing its work since 2014, runs the risk of promoting out-of-date science.