PRESS RELEASE: Heartland Institute Climate Experts React to Latest UN IPCC Report

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, IL (April 7, 2022) – The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) this week. IPCC chairman Hoesung Lee claimed “we are at a crossroads” but need to start reducing overall global emissions of carbon dioxide after 2025 to “secure a livable future.” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said unless we dramatically reduce CO2 emissions, humanity faces a future of “unprecedented heatwaves, terrifying storms, widespread water shortages and the extinction of a million species of plants and animals.”

Climate science and policy experts at The Heartland Institute strongly disagree with this assessment. The Heartland Institute is the world’s most-prominent think tank promoting the work of scientists and other experts who do not think human activity is causing a climate crisis. You can review our work at the Climate Change Reconsidered website, ClimateRealism.com, ClimateAtAGlance.com, the archive of Heartland’s 13 International Conferences on Climate Change, and the climate page at the Heartland website.

The following statements may be used for attribution. If you’d like to interview any of Heartland’s experts, contact Director of Communications Jim Lakely at [email protected], or call/text Jim’s cell at 312-731-9364.

“The IPCC report is tantamount to ‘old whine (pun intended), in new bottles.’ There is nothing truly new in this report. It makes the same unsubstantiated claims of doom, and the same unsubstantiated claims that we can act now, to, in a very short time period, end the use of fossil fuels to save the earth, and profit in the process. The projections of climate models have repeatedly proven inaccurate, and the resources simply do not exist to – in the time frame the IPCC says saving the planet demands – remake the entire global economy sans fossil fuels. In the process of trying, we would destroy the environment by mining, erecting wind turbines and solar arrays, to save it.”

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D.
Director, Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate & Environmental Policy
The Heartland Institute
Managing Editor, Environment & Climate News
[email protected]
214/909-2368

 

“For seemingly the 32nd year in a row, the agenda-driven climate bureaucrats producing IPCC reports tell us that we have just one more year to save humanity from a climate crisis. The IPCC has been scandalously wrong regarding virtually all of their past predictions. There is no reason to believe this version will be any more accurate.”

James Taylor
President
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
727/215-3192

 

“While doomsday predictions grab headlines, real-world data continues to frustrate and counter the extreme claims made by the IPCC. The computer model projections these reports lean on continue to fail to represent past or present temperature changes, and so remain more science fiction than fact. Since this year’s report boasts a greater proportion of social scientists and a focus on ‘social justice’ than in years past, I think it is safe to say that the IPCC is slowly abandoning even the façade of data-driven credibility.”

Linnea Lueken
Research Fellow
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000

 

“The IPCC Chicken Littles have been crying this cry for so long now that no one other than the people making money off of fueling the climate catastrophe hysteria are paying attention anymore. Barbra Streisand has retired less often than the IPCC has issued their ‘This Really Is the Last Chance, Guys’ reports. Each new one drags the organization further and further into irrelevancy.”

Tim Benson
Policy Analyst
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000

 

“The IPCC is relying on questionable information to make an even more-questionable forecast into the future. For example. it has been proven that the RCP 8.5 climate model forecast is impossibly hot because there is simply not enough fossil fuel on the planet to put that much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A peer-reviewed study proved this. Yet the bureaucrats continue to use that climate model because it supports their belief system.

“Their forecast is also predicated on an over-simplistic idea that carbon dioxide is the single controlling factor for the climate. In fact, the climate is exceptionally complex with hundreds of factors in it – many of which aren’t even properly dealt with in the climate models, such as clouds. If you look back at forecast made by the UN over the last 30-plus years, you’ll see that many of them have not even come close to being true. The confidence level in this particular report therefore should be very low.”

Anthony Watts
Senior Fellow
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000

The Heartland Institute is national nonprofit organization founded in 1984 and headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our website or call 312/377-4000.