Clintel, a group who thinks there is no climate emergency, and whose name – rather ironically – stands for Climate Intelligence, has published an analysis of the IPCC. You can download it here, if you’d really like to read it. You need to provide an email address and a name. I have downloaded and read (most of) it, mostly so that you don’t have to.
In some sense, it’s quite remarkable. It repeats many of the climate “myths” that have been debunked time and time again, and relies on the same small group of contrarians whose work has also been regularly debunked. It talks about the Holocene Thermal Maximum and the Little Ice Age. It criticises the Hockey Stick. It suggests that estimates of the global surface temperature aren’t reliable. It argues that the IPCC ignores the role of the Sun, and that models are unreliable. It suggests that climate sensitivity is lower than the IPCC reports suggests and, in a somewhat more modern twist, it also criticises the use of scenarios in climate models.
There are many other topics, but you probably get the general idea. It would do well in a game of Climate Bingo.
Some would argue that rather than simply dismissing this, the arguments should be systematically rebutted. The problem is that this has been done many times before, and there is only so much time that people can spend doing so. However, Skeptical Science has a large list of rebuttals to common Global Warming and Climate Change myths, which is a very useful resource.
However, I do want to highlight one very obvious error early in the report. In Figure 5 of Chapter 1, it claims that there was a large change in the GISS temperature anomaly between the 2001 and 2015 datasets. If you have any understanding of this, you might think that this is because they haven’t used the same baselines. It appears to be even worse than this. They appear to have simply overlaid two plots, not bothered to align the y-axes, and even left both axes visible [Edit: As Paul points out in this comment, this is correct, but very poorly illustrated. There is actually a 0.4C difference between the warming from 1880 – ~2000 in the 2001 data, when compared to the 2015 data, which is related to updates in their methods].
It’s quite something that there are still people willing to promote these arguments, and that there are others who are still willing to take them seriously. It also highlights how difficult it is to actually counter misinformation. It doesn’t matter how often it gets debunked, some people will simply continue to promote it, knowing that most who spend their time countering it will eventually give up. Brandolini’s Law in action.