IPCC WGII AR6, More Insanity: Small Islands, by Kip Hansen

 Source:

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/03/01/ipcc-wgii-ar6-more-insanity-small-islands/

A Shocking Lack of Evidence for Shocking Claims

"The IPCC has rushed out a new portion of the IPCC WGII Sixth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.  

The report itself and all of its summaries and chapters are available from the IPCC web site.  

I say rushed out because when I downloaded Chapter 15: Small Islands at 5:00 pm EST on February 28th, the copy I received was still marked “Accepted Version Subject to Final Edits” and “Do Not Cite, Quote or Distribute”.

They are quite right to mark it “Do Not Cite, Quote or Distribute”  —  I would have suggested expanding that to “Do Not Cite, Quote, Distribute, or Read”.  

But, that would be a personal opinion.

I am afraid I failed to follow my own best advice and have made the mistake of reading Chapter 15:  Small Islands.  

So, having failed to “not read” I will follow up by failing to not cite, quote or distribute potions in this Opinion essay.

... When it was first suggested earlier today by email that I might write a short piece about the IPCC’s new report I dutifully pulled down copies of the sections I thought I could usefully address.  

I read Chapter 15: Small Islands as I have been writing about sea level rise for various organizations over the last six months.   

I replied as follows to that email:

”The report seems to have been written by the inmates of an insane asylum.   

Or maybe by beings from a far distant planet writing about the for-them exo-planet Sol-3 or by humans writing about some far distant exo-planet….”

I don’t want to be dramatic, unlike the writers (if there were any) of the IPCC report, but I could not find anything in the highlights ( the little numbered segments of the report labelled 15.3.1.2 or the like) that was:

1) not trivial – as in something that was, is and will be obvious  or “simple, transparent, or immediately evident”.

2)  true in the real world as we know it, or

3) if predicted or projected, actually likely to take place, at least on this planet in the foreseeable future.

This may seem like a harsh judgement but, believe me, this is mild in regards to the reality – reality being what is missing from the IPCC report’s Small Islands chapter.  

Oh, I’ll concede, they get some things right, such as the idea that all small islands are absolutely surrounded, on all sides, by the sea.  

Or, failing to not quote, “Coastal cities and rural communities on small islands have been already impacted by sea-level rise, heavy precipitation events, tropical cyclones and storm surges.”  

In this case, already means over the entire historical period, or always have been, as far as we can tell.

“As of 2017, an estimated 22 million people in the Caribbean live below 6 meters elevation

and 50% of the Pacific’s population lives within 10 km of the coast

along with ≥50% of their infrastructure concentrated within 500 meters of the coast.”

Gee, mostly true and totally trivial, except for the 22 million people part – the population of the Caribbean region has more than doubled since 1960 to 44 million.  

33+ million of those people live in just three countries:  Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and on just two islands, Cuba and Hispaniola.  

Both of these islands are mountainous and are not low-lying tropical islands.  

6 million more live on Jamaica or Puerto Rico, likewise mountainous.  

Apparently, the authors of Chapter 15 have never visited the Caribbean or only went there on beach-hut drinking (or perhaps ganja) junkets and holidays.  

There is something seriously wrong with the IPCC’s math or altimetry.  

There is, of course, no cite or reference for the data; I suspect it is a repeat of a repeat of a repeat from some obscure report somewhere.  

I managed to trace the idea, but not a quote, to a sea level propaganda piece  produced by ClimateCentral, a member of the climate news cabal Covering Climate Now, of course, based on RCP8.5.  

The actual scientific data from that report:

“Local effects and variation are generally modest in the Caribbean.

For example, under a high carbon emissions scenario, Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (Riahi et al. 2007),

the median 21st-century sea-level-rise projection ranges from 0.74-0.83 m [ under three feet] across 12 tide gauges in this study.”

“At the same time, the Caribbean also faces threats from chronic low-grade flooding aggravated by sea-level rise, and eventually permanent inundation due to ever higher sea levels.”

Only the IPCC junkies at ClimateCentral could stretch the never-gonna-happen RCP8.5 predictions as far as make less than a meter into permanent inundation of the Caribbean.

Despite the near-total consensus understanding that there will be no RCP8.5 scenario in the real world (at least not on this planet),

the latest IPCC report refers to RCP8.5 projections 14 times in this chapter alone.

That is all the needs to be said – the IPCC authors are still in RCP8.5 la-la-la-we’re-all-gonna-die mode.  

Welcome to the booby-hatch."