Last December, on the heels of a pronouncement from former United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) head honcho, Yvo de Boer, I had asked the question: Where’s the scare in AR5? The UNFCCC is the “main client” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
de Boer had told an Australian newspaper that:
his conversations with scientists working on the next report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested the findings would be shocking.
“That report is going to scare the wits out of everyone,” Mr de Boer said in the only scheduled interview of his visit to Australia. “I’m confident those scientific findings will create new political momentum.”
This wasn’t quite the equivalent of Andrew <we are the vote> Weaver’s 2007 “barrage of intergalactic ballistic missiles“, but it was close.
As far as I know, de Boer declined to answer the question. And in the meantime, the dedicated alarmists have been doing their best to pretend that the mounting evidence of failed projections of IPCC reports past doesn’t matter – and they seem unable to meet the challenge of coming to grips with the almost daily collapse of yet another of their Big Green Dreams.
I don’t know if there’s any rivalry between Greenpeace (for whom Weaver might well be considered a PR agent), and WWF; but if the claims of Alexei Kokorin, head of WWF-Russia are to be believed, one might conclude that Korkorin Kokorin has actually surpassed Weaver in the over-the-top Big Scares ‘R Us department.
There’s a Norwegian NGO (that I’d never heard of before) called Bellona. Someone from Bellona interviewed Kokorin [h/t GWPF]. To my ears this sounds an awful lot like “next chorus, next verse, a little bit louder and a whole lot worse”:
Climate experts to announce global climate time bomb will go off by 2040, says WWF’s Kokorin
MOSCOW –The upcoming fifth climate change report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is believed to reveal new, and gruesome, scientific data: Natural and anthropogenic factors contributing to global climate change will escalate in the 2040s, causing ever more devastating effects on the planet. The “climate time bomb” is set to go off – unless humankind does something about it.
Andrei Ozharovsky, 21/05-2013 – Translated by Maria Kaminskaya
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading international body for the assessment of climate change, is working toward a future release of its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), due for finalization in 2014. Compared with previous reports, the IPCC site says, “the AR5 will put greater emphasis on assessing the socio-economic aspects of climate change and implications for sustainable development, risk management and the framing of a response through both adaptation and mitigation.” Last week, the report was sent out from Geneva for closed-access perusal by the governments of the IPCC member states.
[…]
The climate time bomb
Bellona: Can we speculate as to what will be said in this report?
Alexei Kokorin: The main thing that is expected to be there is data saying that the climate “time bomb” may blow up sometime around 2040. Whereas earlier it was believed that man’s impact on the climate was gradual, and that the situation was deteriorating in a gradual way, now – in contrast to the previous report, which was being put together seven years ago – much more information has been obtained on ocean cycles and other natural fluctuations. Scientists have realized that today, in the 2010s, man’s impact is being mitigated by natural cycles that are offsetting the impact made on the climate by man. This situation will hold for about another twenty years. But it is completely clear that after that, this mitigation will yield to escalation.
We are having a sort of a breather now, but soon enough, we’ll see an onslaught of both – both natural and man-made processes that are causing the rise in temperature.
And temperature will surge dramatically. Yes, temperature rise will then slow down again, sometime in the 2070s, but it will soar up again after that. Understanding this is what makes this new knowledge principally different from what was known seven years ago.
A “respite given by nature”: a lucky break to turn the crisis around
Bellona: What must be done in this situation?
Alexei Kokorin: When you’re told that in the past fifteen years, the temperature of surface air on the planet has not been rising, this should not in any way be construed as proof that humankind’s impact on the climate has ceased. Scientists know it hasn’t. They know it’s because of how natural fluctuations are superimposed on the impact made by man. This is just a respite that nature gave us. And we must use this respite not for wishful thinking and inaction, but for reducing emissions, because after this respite, a double effect will ensue. [emphasis added -hro]
I suppose it’s possible that Kokorin was not quite as alarmist in his responses as “direct action” activist Bellona’s report indicates – and/or that nuance got lost in translation.
When the Second Order Draft of Working Group I (WGI)’s report was leaked last year, as I had noted in my post, Dr. Judith Curry had remarked that:
“The extreme overconfidence of many of their conclusions is bewildering”
One would think that – particularly in light of the InterAcademy Council’s recommendations – the IPCC might have at least learned one lesson. And, who knows, perhaps they have. If Kokorin’s claims are actually found in the report, it will certainly be interesting to read the Lead Authors’:
traceable account of the steps used to arrive at estimates of uncertainty or confidence for key findings.
Then again, perhaps this will turn out to be a false alarm from Kokorin whose “speculations” may well be nothing more than echoes and embellishments of de Boer’s.
Oh, well … time will tell;-)
The View From Here 
Gives life and meaning to the title “Piled higher and Deeper”. What would we do without PhDs?