Following Gaia Fawkes’ revelation that the long time chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, had attempted to suppress sexual harassment allegations, Pachauri has stepped down, leaving the top IPCC job up for grabs. Three candidates have been nominated by their respective governments and another three are thought to be considering:
- Jean-Pascal van Ypersele: Belgian vice-chairman of the IPCC. Famous for blaming the Climategate on the Russian secret service.
- Thomas Stocker: Swiss co-chair of the IPCC’s physical science working group. Is well known for wanting to reverse the IPCC’s current position of not being policy-prescriptive.
- Chris Field: American co-chair of the IPCC’s impacts and adaptation working group. He believes the “world is staring down the barrel of climate change.”
- Hoesung Lee: South Korean vice-chair IPCC vice-chair. Claims to be a scientist – is an economist.
- Nebojsa Nakicenovic: Austrian. Another economist.
- David Griggs: British, probably marginally less likely to be completely corrupt.
- Jeremy Clarkson: Well, he’s looking for work.
They sound like a reasonable bunch…
A major peer-reviewed paper in Science Bulletin, a respected academic periodical, has accused the IPCC’s climate model of being riddled with errors. The authors of the paper –‘Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model’ – have presented a new “simple model” that suggests the doubling of CO2 emissions could warm the planet by 1°C- significantly less than the IPCC’s predicted 3.3°C rise.
As seen in the chart above, the simple model proposed in the paper is closer to observed real world temperature change than the IPCC’s current and previous models. One particularity egregious error the paper’s authors level at the IPCC, is that it has been running made up figures in its climate model in order to pump up projected climate change projections – they overestimate population growth by over two billion.
If further proof is needed, it’s also a bit nippy out today innit…
