The IPCC is issuing its sixth Assessment Report and it implies that the Earth is on a knife edge.
The once-in-a-thousand-year rainfall flooding in Germany with all the lost lives is heralded as another example of climate tragedy. But this ignores the historic medieval floods and the incompetent authorities that wouldn’t heed the local weather forecasts and didn’t launch the emergency alert system that other northern European countries implemented.
Forest fires in Greece, Turkey, Russia and the western United States are again cited as a direct result of global warming while overlooking the best practices of forest fireload management, maintenance of electric utility power lines and towers, and the inevitable arson. Similar alarmists predict catastrophic sea level rise but forget to acknowledge that ocean water volume has been increasing for at least 20,000 years; since the last Ice Age.
By all means, read the Executive Summaries of the ARs (1990, 1995, 2001, 2007 and 2014) and note the various confidence levels of their predictions/projections. Also analyze all the statistical models that struggle with reconciliation of actual temperature and rainfall observation from previous years. If the past cannot be statistically fitted into the equations, then the future is far from certain.
