The Cassandra Report - IPCC On the Rocks

DRAFT 02/28/2023 - For comment only

I have suffered from the "Cassandra Complex." It turns out that I am very good at seeing catastrophes coming. At least three times, I have been fired from huge projects for predicting disaster. Once disaster actually struck, for some reason, nobody got back to pat me on the back. That's the curse.

Over the years, I have created a few computer models. For a long time, people have looked at complex systems and reached for their computers. Surely it's just a matter of crunching the numbers. It turns out that, even in the simplest of systems, there is always a huge gap between what the computer can "know" and what happens in the real world. In my experience, it is a rare model that tells you something you didn't already know. Surprising results are usually just wrong.

"The Delinquent Teenager" by investigative reporter Donna Lafromabousie will dispel any illusions you may have about the IPCC having anything to do with "Science." It's politics.

Founded in 1988 to address the growing concern about the effect of C02 on the atmosphere, the IPCC was headed for the rocks from the outset. Its mandate was to "address the Science related to climate change." The emphasis was on climate change, and they never got away from assuming that this was about change resulting in increased "greenhouse gasses" in the atmosphere. Although the IPCC amassed a huge database of climate information, they never lost sight of the initial idea. The founding assumption and reason to exist for the IPCC were that C02 was accumulating to dangerous levels in the atmosphere. How dangerous? How soon? 

Enter the computer models.

All IPCC models then and now are designed to answer a single question: what happens when the concentration of C02 goes to "X."

It should be mentioned that attempts to model the weather led to the discovery of the Theory of Chaos. There are very good reasons to suspect that predicting climate is impossible. No problem, full speed ahead. Throw money around. Have lots of meetings. Lots and lots of data.

The problem is, in the real world, C02 doesn't have a significant effect on climate. The second problem was that the climate turns out to be maddeningly difficult to "model," especially when you leave out the effects of the actual drivers of climate: water and sunlight. Even with everything factored in, it may still be impossible to predict climate. 

As they twisted the C02 "knob" in their models, they wound up with impressively scary and entirely fictitious digital worlds. Then and now, objections were raised that these models could not and did not "predict" anything about the real world. Such objections were silenced. Nay-sayers were cast into the cold as "deniers."  Questions were rudely dismissed. Skeptics were banned from public presentations.

Fictitious "predictions" of disaster were knowingly presented to the world as fact: as a basis of policy. Stunningly, the idea of a "net zero carbon" emerged and was accepted by everyone, from politicians to teenagers, as the only way forward if we were to save the planet from disaster. The climate "crisis" was a settled fact.

The result has been the greatest peacetime blunder in the history of the planet. 

The story of the IPCC catastrophe will survive in history for centuries. Not so, the IPCC itself. IPCC is a political entity, and politicians are famously slow to learn. But, as the staggering cost of bad advice and misdirection becomes clear, the IPCC cannot survive. Sadly, as funding dries up, the infant science of climatology will be devastated. I hope everyone has their files backed up.

And, of course, nobody will get back to me and say thanks for the warning.

I summarize the current status of the IPCC boondoggle here.