Major Swiss Daily Chief Editor: “Never Have I Read The Words ‘Probable’ Or ‘Improbable’ So Often” …”Dosed Prophecy”

The editor-in-chief of the Basler Zeitung Markus Somm has posted a damning, stinging commentary on the recently released AR5 Summary for Policymakers (SPM).

Somm first describes the AR5 SPM as a 40-page document pieced-together from 2000 pages “by climate scientists and representatives from numerous countries over four days behind closed doors in Stockholm.”

Then he describes the desperate straits which the proponents of anthropogenic global warming find themselves in, especially since numerous errors were uncovered in the earlier reports and observed temperature data have long since departed from the model projections. He describes the AR5 SPM (my emphasis):

It appears defensive. It is a masterpiece of dosed prophecy. Had Moses taken the same approach, he would not have convinced a single Jew to leave Egypt … In no paper from science or politics have I read the word ‘probable’ or ‘improbable’ so often.”

In Somm’s view the authors of the report appear less confident with their science than ever. He writes:

For some scientists boldness (and cockiness) have long disappeared since unliked climate skeptics uncovered some embarrassing errors in the last report: You can practically smell the authors’ perspiration of fear – and from time to time you even feel a little pity. With all computer models and measurements and simulations on which they fall back on: Things aren’t developing as they imagined a few years ago. […] For some scientists this inconvenient fact has pulled the rug from under their feet…So what to do?”

Somm calls the failed models a “fiasco for the scientists” and describes the efforts they expended to gloss over all the inconvenient facts.

In addition to citing failed models, Somm discusses the fact that CO2 concentration increased strongly over the last 15 years, yet failed to increase the global temperature and that climate scientists are exasperated in finding an explanation for this. In the report, Somm writes that they blame the oceans for absorbing more heat than assumed and that “the consensus with this question is merely ‘medium’“.

And thus Somm thinks it’s tragic that ambitious politicians would force expensive things like large scale renewable energy on such “rather volatile findings“.

Somm concludes:

In the latest IPCC report the scientists overall are significantly reducing their long-term forecast. For the first time. And probably not the last”.

Probabilities everywhere.

Read Somm’s entire piece here (in German).