THIS POST IS A CRITICAL REVIEW OF THE 2020 CLIMATE CHANGE REPORT ISSUED BY THE WORLD METEOROLOGICAL ORGANIZATION (WMO) AND THE UNITED NATIONS.

RELATED POST ON THE WMO: THE WMO CLIMATE ALARM OF 2019: https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/09/25/wmo2019/

PART-1: WHAT THE 2020 WMO CLIMATE REPORT SAYS

1. A wide-ranging UN climate report, released on Tuesday, shows that climate change is having a major effect on all aspects of the environment, as well as on the health and wellbeing of the global population. The report, The WMO Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2019, which is led by the UN weather agency (World Meteorological Organization), contains data from an extensive network of partners. It documents physical signs of climate change – such as increasing land and ocean heat, accelerating sea level rise and melting ice – and the knock-on effects on socio-economic development, human health, migration and displacement, food security, and land and marine ecosystems.
2. Writing in the foreword to the report, UN chief António Guterres warned that the world is currently way off track meeting either the 1.5°C or 2°C targets that the Paris Agreement calls for, referring to the commitment made by the international community in 2015, to keep global average temperatures well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
3. A new annual global temperature record is likely in the next five years. It is a matter of time. Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General, WMO, writes: Several heat records have been broken in recent years and decades: the report confirms that 2019 was the second warmest year on record, and 2010-2019 was the warmest decade on record. Since the 1980s, each successive decade has been warmer than any preceding decade since 1850. The warmest year so far was 2016, but that could be topped soon, said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.
4. Given that greenhouse gas levels continue to increase, the warming will continue. A recent decadal forecast indicates that a new annual global temperature record is likely in the next five years. It is a matter of time”, added the WMO Secretary-General. In an interview with UN News, Mr. Taalas said that, there is a growing understanding across society, from the finance sector to young people, that climate change is the number one problem mankind is facing today.
5. There are plenty of good signs that we have started moving in the right direction”. “Last year emissions dropped in developed countries, despite the growing economy, so we have been to show that you can detach economic growth from emission growth. The bad news is that, in the rest of the world, emissions grew last year. So, if we want to solve this problem we have to have all the countries on board”. (but we don’t).
6. Mr. Taalas added that countries still aren’t fulfilling commitments they made at the UN Paris climate conference in 2015, leaving the world currently on course for a four to five degree temperature increase by the end of this century: “there’s clearly a need for higher ambition levels if we’re serious about climate mitigation”.
7. Mr. Taalas noted that 2020 has seen the warmest January recorded so far, and that winter has been “unseasonably mild” in many parts of the northern hemisphere.
8. Ongoing warming in Antarctica saw large-scale ice melt and the fracturing of a glacier, with repercussions for sea level rise, and carbon dioxide emissions spiked following the devastating Australian bushfires, which spread smoke and pollutants around the world.
9. Australia’s 2018-2019 summer was the hottest ever recorded, reaching a peak of 41.9 degrees centigrade on December 18. Australia’s seven hottest days on record, and nine of the 10 hottest, occurred in 2019. The country was not the only place affected by extreme heat, or wildfires.
10. Temperature records were broken in several European countries, including France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Even Nordic countries saw record-breaking temperatures, including Finland, which registered a high of 33.2 degrees in the capital, Helsinki.
11. Several high latitude regions, including Siberia and Alaska, saw high levels of fire activity, as did some parts of the Arctic, where it was previously extremely rare.
12. Indonesia and neighbouring countries had their most significant fire season since 2015, and total fire activity in South America was the highest since 2010.
13. There have been widespread impacts of ocean warming. Ice floating on the waters of Prince Gustav Channel in Antarctica, where an ice shelf (Prince Gustav Ice Shelf) of more than 28 km used to exist. The ice shelf has since retreated and collapsed.
14. Greenhouse gas emissions continued to grow in 2019, leading to increased ocean heat, and such phenomena as rising sea levels, the altering of ocean currents, melting floating ice shelves, and dramatic changes in marine ecosystems.
15. The ocean has seen increased acidification and deoxygenation, with negative impacts on marine life, and the wellbeing of people who depend on ocean ecosystems.
16. At the poles, sea ice continues to decline, and glaciers shrunk yet again, for the 32nd consecutive year. Between 2002 and 2016, the Greenland ice sheet lost some 260 Gigatonnes of ice per year, with a peak loss of 458 Gigatonnes in 2011/12. The 2019 loss of 329 Gigatonnes, was well above average.
17. In 2019, extreme weather events, some of which were unprecedented in scale, took place in many parts of the world. The monsoon season saw rainfall above the long-term average in India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Myanmar, and flooding led to the loss of some 2,200 lives in the region.
18. Parts of South America were hit by floods in January, whilst Iran was badly affected in late March and early April. In the US, total economic losses from flooding were estimated at around $20 billion.
19. Other regions suffered a severe lack of water. Australia has its driest year on record, and Southern Africa, Central America and parts of South America received abnormally low rains.
20. 2019 also saw an above-average number of tropical cyclones, with 72 in the northern hemisphere, and 27 in the southern hemisphere. Some notably destructive cyclones were Idai, which caused widespread devastation in Mozambique and the east coast of Africa; Dorian, which hit the Bahamas and remained almost stationary for some 24 hours; and Hagibis, which caused severe flooding in Japan.
21. The changing climate is exerting a toll on the health of the global population: the reports shows that in 2019, record high temperatures led to over 100 deaths in Japan, and 1,462 deaths in France. Dengue virus increased in 2019, due to higher temperatures, which have been making it easier for mosquitos to transmit the disease over several decades.
22. Following years of steady decline, hunger is again on the rise, driven by a changing climate and extreme weather events: over 820 million people were affected by hunger in 2018. The countries in the Horn of Africa were particularly affected in 2019, where the population suffered from climate extremes, displacement, conflict and violence. The region suffered droughts, then unusually heavy rains towards the end of the year, which was a factor in the worst locust outbreak in the past 25 years.
23. Worldwide, some 6.7 million people were displaced from their homes due to natural hazards – in particular storms and floods, such as the many devastating cyclones, and flooding in Iran, the Philippines and Ethiopia. The report forecasts an internal displacement figure of around 22 million people throughout the whole of 2019, up from 17.2 million in 2018.
24. COP26: time to aim high. “We have to aim high at the next climate conference in Glasgow in November”, said Mr. Guterres, speaking at the launch of the report at UN Headquarters in New York, on Tuesday, referring to the 2020 UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), due to be held in the Scottish City in November.
25. The UN chief called on all countries to demonstrate that emission cuts of 45 per cent from 2010 levels are possible this decade, and that net-zero emissions will be achieved by the middle of the century. Four priorities for COP26 were outlined by Mr. Guterres: more ambitious national climate plans that will keep global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels; strategies to reach net zero emissions by 2050; a comprehensive programme of support for climate adaptation and resilience; and financing for a sustainable, green economy. ‘We will not fight climate change with a virus‘
26. The UN chief also addressed the ongoing spread of COVID-19, in response to a question on its likely effect on the climate, given the resulting drop in economic activity and, consequently, emissions. Mr. Guterres firmly responded that “both require a determined response. Both must be defeated”. Although emissions have been reduced, Mr. Guterres noted that “we will not fight climate change with a virus“. In addition, he underlined the importance of not allowing the fight against the virus to distract from the need to defeat climate change, inequality and the many other problems the world is facing. Whilst the disease is expected to be temporary, climate change, added the Secretary-General, has been a phenomenon for many years, and and will “remain with us for decades and require constant action”.

PART-2: CRITICAL COMMENTARY

1. CLAIM: Many temperature records cited as evidence of anthropogenic global warming and of its dangers that lie ahead without climate action> RESPONSE: AGW is a theory of about long term trends in global mean temperature. Temperature events have no interpretation in terms of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) as they are constrained by time or geography or both. The list of “hottest ever” temperatures and the obsession with “temperature records” by the head man of the WMO is therefore irrelevant in the AGW context. Details in a related post: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/07/16/the-internal-variability-issue/ . The strange obsession with record temperatures and the repeated citation of record temperatures must therefore be understood as desperation advocacy for the climate action pact that the United Nations had promised but failed to deliver – their only achievement being to waste $billions of tax payers’ money holding COPs and shamelessly promoting yet another COP having achieved nothing in the last 25 COPs.
2. CLAIM: the world is currently way off track for meeting either the 1.5°C or 2°C targets that the Paris Agreement . RESPONSE: The implication of the “way of track” condition is that the UN bureaucrats, who had taken charge of the climate change issue with the assumption and the proposition that they could reproduce their Montreal Protocol success in the climate change issue, and who are now lecturing us from their high pedestal, have failed. The reason for this failure is the childish inability to comprehend the enormous difference between changing refrigerants and overhauling the world’s energy infrastructure from fossil fuels to renewable energy technologies that are still in development and not ready for the energy market. LINK to related post showing that renewable energy is still under development https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/08/18/energy-storage/
3. QUOTE: “Last year emissions dropped in developed countries, despite the growing economy, so we have been to show that you can detach economic growth from emission growth. The bad news is that, in the rest of the world, emissions grew last year.” RESPONSE: To study emission reduction and the relationship between emission reduction and economic growth one must take a global view because of the role of trade in economics as described in a related post: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/05/22/climate-catch22/ . Specifically, nations that take climate action increase their production costs but still have access to cheap products from non-climate-action nations. On a very fundamental basis global warming and climate action must be understood and analyzed only on a global basis without the circular reasoning and confirmation bias tendency to look for sub-sections of the globe where the data suit the proposition in question. LINK POST ON CONFIRMATION BIAS: https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/08/03/confirmationbias/
4. QUOTE: countries still aren’t fulfilling commitments they made at the UN Paris climate conference in 2015, leaving the world currently on course for a four to five degree temperature increase by the end of this century: “there’s clearly a need for higher ambition. RESPONSE: That countries are not fulfilling commitments they made at the Paris Agreement does not mean that we need “AMBITION”. It means that the UN lied to us about Paris. Having suffered a dramatic failure at Copenhagen to produce such a global climate action agreement in the image of the Montreal Protocol, they used weird bureaucratic language in Paris, not to to achieve the needed global agreement to reduce global emissions but for the participating countries to independently submit INDCs. The acronym INDC stands for “INTENDED NATIONALLY DETERMINED CONTRIBUTION” to global emission reduction. These INDCs are different and they represent intention and not commitment. Therefore what is called the “Paris Agreement” is not an agreement because there is no contract that all the nations signed except that they agree to submit INDCs. The UN’s repeated effort to present this collection of INDCs as a global agreement to cut emissions is an extreme form of bureaucratic lying with bureaucratic language to overcome the reality that their promise and pretense to a “Montreal Protocol” for climate has failed. This is how bureaucrats lie. Here are some more examples of bureaucratic lying by UN bureaucrats that has reduced them now to begging for ambition: LINK TO BUREAUCRATIC LYING: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/05/29/how-bureaucrats-lie/
5. QUOTE: “Several high latitude regions, including Siberia and Alaska, saw high levels of fire activity, as did some parts of the Arctic, where it was previously extremely rare. Indonesia and neighbouring countries had their most significant fire season since 2015, and total fire activity in South America was the highest since 2010“. RESPONSE: Several examples of wildfires are cited. These occurred in Siberia, Alaska, Indonesia, and other unspecified locations in SE Asia, with the implication but without supporting evidence that they were the result of fossil fuel emissions and that they could have been prevented with climate action and that so therefore we must take climate action so that such horrors don’t happen again in the future. There is no useful information in these statements except that they too serve as evidence of desperation at the UN with regard to its failure in its assumed role as global environmental protection agency that gave us the Montreal Protocol and that therefore they should be able to do that for climate change. The underlying information in these bizarre statements of desperation is that the UN has failed.
6. QUOTE: There have been widespread impacts of ocean warming. Ice floating on the waters of Prince Gustav Channel in Antarctica, where an ice shelf (Prince Gustav Ice Shelf) of more than 28 km used to exist. The ice shelf has since retreated and collapsed. RESPONSE: The retreat and collapse of the Prince Gustav Ice Shelf (PGIS) in the Antarctic Peninsula was a decadal event that began in 1995 and ended in 2006 – long before the year 2019 stated as the timeline of the UN article. Over this period, global warming was recorded at 0.013C/year or 0.13C per decade but Antarctica warmed at a rate of 0.0016C per year or 0.016C per decade but with significant seasonal differences. The winter months (June and July) actually show cooling but the summer month (November) shows warming of about 50% higher than annual mean. At the same time, we find that the Antarctic Peninsula is a very geologically active area where geothermal heat explains most ice melt phenomena there LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/06/27/antarctica/ . However, in the study of the collapse of the PGIS, climate science attributes the event to global warming on the only evidence that there were melt ponds on the ice surface. Ice melt by geothermal heat does not create melt ponds. Therefore, only on the basis of melt ponds, climate science has concluded that the PGIS collapse must have been a creation of global warming. The flaw in this attribution is that melt ponds in the Antarctic Peninsula are known to be caused by foehn winds. See for example, “Datta, et al, The effect of Foehn‐induced surface melt on firn evolution over the Antarctic Peninsula.” Geophysical Research Letters 46.7 (2019): 3822-3831“. LINK TO RELATED POST: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/02/26/antarctica-heat-wave-of-2020/ Also, if atmospheric warmth were the cause of ice melt events, the extreme localization of these events to geologically active Antarctic Peninsula requires an explanation. Therefore, surface melt ponds, in and of themselves, do not serve as evidence that the the PGIS collapse of 2006 occurred because of atmospheric warming from above and not geological warming from below. In the geologically active regions of Antarctica, such as the Antarctic Peninsula, ocean warming must be understood in terms of geological heat.
7. QUOTE: The ocean has seen increased acidification and deoxygenation, with negative impacts on marine life, and the wellbeing of people who depend on ocean ecosystems. RESPONSE: Ocean acidification, described as rising carbonic acid in the ocean and its falling pH is found in the data. However, its attribution to fossil fuel emissions has simply been assumed. No evidence for this attribution is found in the data. Furthermore, the paleo climate event that serves as a reference for this chapter in climate science in terms of its horror is the Paleocene-Eocene-Thermal-Maximum (PETM) that was a natural event driven by carbon from the ocean where there is a more carbon than in the atmosphere. The fear of ocean acidification by fossil fuel emissions likely derives from an atmosphere bias in climate science: Details in these related posts: LINK#1: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/03/20/an-atmosphere-bias-part-2/ LINK#2: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/08/14/ocean-volcanism/ LIST OF POSTS ON OCEAN ACIDIFICATION: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/08/22/ocean-acidification/
8. QUOTE: At the poles, sea ice continues to decline, and glaciers shrunk yet again, for the 32nd consecutive year. Between 2002 and 2016, the Greenland ice sheet lost some 260 Gigatonnes of ice per year, with a peak loss of 458 Gigatonnes in 2011/12. The 2019 loss of 329 Gigatonnes, was well above average. RESPONSE: Summer minimum sea ice extent is not declining “at the poles”. It is declining only in the Arctic. It is not declining in the Antarctic. RELATED POSTS ON SEA ICE: ARCTIC: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/09/25/list-of-arctic-sea-ice-posts/ ANTARCTICA: https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/08/06/antarctic-sea-ice-1979-2018/ That the Greenland Ice sheet is fast and will cause cataclysmic sea level rise is based on data that contains large uncertainties with uncertainty removed from consideration in the data analysis. LINK TO GREENLAND POST: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/09/19/greenlands-future-sea-level-rise/
9. QUOTE: In 2019, extreme weather events, some of which were unprecedented in scale, took place in many parts of the world. The monsoon season saw rainfall above the long-term average in India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Myanmar, and flooding led to the loss of some 2,200 lives in the region. Parts of South America were hit by floods in January, whilst Iran was badly affected in late March and early April. In the US, total economic losses from flooding were estimated at around $20 billion. Other regions suffered a severe lack of water. Australia has its driest year on record, and Southern Africa, Central America and parts of South America received abnormally low rains. RESPONSE: IN A RELATED POST ON THIS SITE, WE REPORT FINDINGS OF CLIMATE SCIENCE ON WHAT HAS BEEN TERMED THE “INTERNAL VARIABILITY ISSUE” [LINK] where we show that these extreme weather events cannot be understood in terms of AGW because of geographical and time span limitations of these events. In the case of India, we have a land area limited by latitude and longitude that constitutes less than 0.645% of land areas of the world. Therefore short term climate events in India cannot be interpreted in terms of global warming. In this context, we must understand Indian climate not just in terms of  global warming driven mainly by fossil fuel emissions, but also in terms of internal climate variability driven by nature. THEREFORE, IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO UNDERSTAND YEAR TO YEAR INDIAN MONSOON VARIABILITY IN TERMS OF ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING BECAUSE OF THE GREATER ROLE PLAYED BY NATURE IN TERMS OF INTERNAL CLIMATE VARIABILITY UNDER THE CONDITIONS IN WHICH THE ATTRIBUTION TO AGW IS CLAIMED. This separation between regional climate events and AGW applies equally to the South American floods, the drought events in Australia, South Africa, and Central America. LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/08/09/2020-indian-monsoon-season-climate-change/
10. CLAIM: 2019 saw an above-average number of tropical cyclones, with 72 in the northern hemisphere, and 27 in the southern hemisphere. Some notably destructive cyclones were Idai, which caused widespread devastation in Mozambique and the east coast of Africa; Dorian, which hit the Bahamas and remained almost stationary for some 24 hours; and Hagibis, which caused severe flooding in Japan. RESPONSE: Climate science describes the expected response of tropical cyclones to climate change only in very long time spans. See for example, Knutson etal 2010 where the authors write: “Knutson, Thomas R., et al. “Tropical cyclones and climate change.” Nature geoscience 3.3 (2010): 157-163. In the paper, Tom Knutson spells out exactly what climate science claims in terms of the impact of AGW climate change on tropical cyclones with climate model predictions of the effect of rising SST on tropical cyclones. His main points are as follows: (1) Globally averaged intensity of tropical cyclones will rise as AGW increases SST. Models predict globally averaged intensity increase of 2% to 11% by 2100. (2). Models predict falling globally averaged frequency of tropical cyclones with frequency decreasing 6%-34% by 2100. (3). The globally averaged frequency of “most intense tropical cyclones” should increase as a result of AGW. The intensity of tropical cyclones is measured as the ACE (Accumulated Cyclone Energy). (4). Models predict increase in precipitation within a 100 km radius of the storm center. A precipitation rise of 20% is projected for the year 2100. (5) Extremely high variance in tropical cyclone data at an annual time scale suggests longer, perhaps a decadal time scale which in turn greatly reduces statistical power. (6) Model projections for individual cyclone basins show large differences and conflicting results. Thus, no testable implication can be derived for studies of individual basins“. These works imply that the impact of AGW on tropical cyclones can only be assessed in terms of data from all six tropical cyclone basins over a sufficiently long period of time of over 30 years. Citing three selected tropical cyclones from three basins over a time span of one year does not provide useful information about the impact of AGW on tropical cyclones. LINK#1: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/03/04/agwcyclones/ LINK#2: https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/08/01/tropical-cyclones-climate-change/
11. QUOTE: In 2019, record high temperatures led to over 100 deaths in Japan, and 1,462 deaths in France. Dengue virus increased in 2019, due to higher temperatures, which have been making it easier for mosquitos to transmit the disease over several decades. RESPONSE: Once again we find that the data provided are climate events that are both time and geography constrained so that no causal relationship with AGW can be inferred from the data. In this regard, the Japan incident is described in some detail in a related post. LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/07/26/climate-change-kills/
12. COP26 IN GLASGOW: The UN/WMO survey of climate change closes with a promotional essay on COP26 in which it is claimed that the answer to all these climate change horrors listed is to make COP26 a success by reaching a global agreement on emission reduction. The closing arguments imply that the essay on the impacts of climate change was simply a promotional piece to make sure the fear level had been raised sufficiently high to make COP26 a success. It also implies that contradiction that the organization that is pleading for a global emission reduction agreement at Glasgow is the same organization that claims to have produced a global emission reduction agreement at Paris. This contradiction may be understood in terms of fatal flaws in the world’s trust in these bureaucrats to understand and help solve the climate crisis by repeating their apparent success in the Montreal Protocol. LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/02/25/un/