Royal Society Doesn’t Know How Much The Planet Will Warm

Climate Changes, But Facts Don’t: Debunking Monckton

On the 19th of July in 2011 the National Press Club of Australia held a debate on climate change. In this video I will be analysing the claims Monckton made during the debate and if they are correct or not.

The reason I’m doing this is that Monckton challenges his critics to check his sources, or like he put it in this debate “to do your homework”. I’m going to follow him up on this to see if the scientific literature, and other available sources, corroborate what he’s saying.

Video description

On the 19th of July in 2011 the National Press Club of Australia held a debate on climate change. I will be analysing the claims Monckton made during the debate and if they are correct or not.

In this section of the debate Monckton says the following:

"The Royal Society, in a complete rewrite of its original disastrous unscientific statement about the climate, now says we do not know who much the planet will warm as a result of our activity."

In this video I will be addressing this particular claim about the Royal Society and talk about what the released statement does and does not say.

Transcript

The Royal Society, in a complete rewrite of its original disastrous unscientific statement about the climate, now says we do not know how much the planet will warm as a result of our activity.

Monckton is most likely referring to the document Climate Change Guide that was released by the Royal Society in September 2010, as several other contrarians and so-called sceptics have made similar claims about it.

This claim has its probable genesis from sentences like the one in the second paragraph of the introduction where they state the following:

The size of future temperature increases and other aspects of climate change, especially at the regional scale, are still subject to uncertainty.

They expand on this in paragraph 40 in the section Future Climate Change and it states:

As with almost any attempts to forecast future conditions, projections of future climate change depend on a number of factors. Future emissions due to human activity will depend on social, technological and population changes which cannot be known with confidence. The underlying uncertainties in climate science and the inability to predict precisely the size of future natural climate forcing mechanisms mean that projections must be made which take into account the range of uncertainties across these different

The 2007 assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made projections of future changes using a number of possible scenarios of future emissions, based on a diverse range of assumptions. The IPCC’s best estimate was that globally averaged surface temperatures would be between 2.5 - 4.7 C higher by 2100 compared to pre-industrial levels. The full range of projected temperature increases by 2100 was found to be 1.8 - 7.1C based on the various scenarios and uncertainties in climate sensitivity.

So they actually do give a most likely increase in temperature in the document they released. And their statements reflect what has been written in the IPCC documents.

Sources

  1. The Royal Society - Climate change: a summary of the science - September 2010

Climate Changes, But Facts Don’t: Debunking Monckton