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UPDATE: over at Annans’ blog, now there is this new essay expounding on the issue titled: A sensitive matter, and this paragraph in it caught my eye because it speaks to a recent “leak” done here at WUWT:
But the point stands, that the IPCC’s sensitivity estimate cannot readily be reconciled with forcing estimates and observational data. All the recent literature that approaches the question from this angle comes up with similar answers, including the papers I mentioned above. By failing to meet this problem head-on, the IPCC authors now find themselves in a bit of a pickle. I expect them to brazen it out, on the grounds that they are the experts and are quite capable of squaring the circle before breakfast if need be. But in doing so, they risk being seen as not so much summarising scientific progress, but obstructing it.
Readers may recall this now famous graph from the IPCC leak, animated and annotated by Dr. Ira Glickstein in this essay here:
IPCC AR5 draft figure 1-4 with animated central Global Warming predictions from FAR (1990), SAR (1996), TAR (2001), and AR5 (2007).
Yes, the IPCC is “in a bit of a pickle” to say the least, since as Annan said in his comment/email to Revkin:
…combined with the stubborn refusal of the planet to warm as had been predicted over the last decade, all makes a high climate sensitivity increasingly untenable.
UPDATE 2: Annan also speaks about lying as a political motivator within the IPCC, I’ve repeated this extraordinary paragraph in full. Bold mine.
Note for the avoidance of any doubt I am not quoting directly from the unquotable IPCC draft, but only repeating my own comment on it. However, those who have read the second draft of Chapter 12 will realise why I previously said I thought the report was improved :-) Of course there is no guarantee as to what will remain in the final report, which for all the talk of extensive reviews, is not even seen by the proletariat, let alone opened to their comments, prior to its final publication. The paper I refer to as a “small private opinion poll” is of course the Zickfeld et al PNAS paper. The list of pollees in the Zickfeld paper are largely the self-same people responsible for the largely bogus analyses that I’ve criticised over recent years, and which even if they were valid then, are certainly outdated now. Interestingly, one of them stated quite openly in a meeting I attended a few years ago that he deliberately lied in these sort of elicitation exercises (i.e. exaggerating the probability of high sensitivity) in order to help motivate political action. Of course, there may be others who lie in the other direction, which is why it seems bizarre that the IPCC appeared to rely so heavily on this paper to justify their choice, rather than relying on published quantitative analyses of observational data. Since the IPCC can no longer defend their old analyses in any meaningful manner, it seems they have to resort to an unsupported “this is what we think, because we asked our pals”. It’s essentially the Lindzen strategy in reverse: having firmly wedded themselves to their politically convenient long tail of high values, their response to new evidence is little more than sticking their fingers in their ears and singing “la la la I can’t hear you”.
Oh dear oh dear oh dear…
Annan doesn’t seem to be suggesting that CS is < 2, but rather that it isn't above 4.5. I'd bet he still thinks it hovers around 3.
I'm more interested in this bit:
"Interestingly, one of them stated quite openly in a meeting I attended a few years ago that he deliberately lied in these sort of elicitation exercises (i.e. exaggerating the probability of high sensitivity) in order to help motivate political action. Of course, there may be others who lie in the other direction, which is why it seems bizarre that the IPCC appeared to rely so heavily on this paper to justify their choice, rather than relying on published quantitative analyses of observational data."
That's fraud. That's blatant fraud. Conspiracy theory my @$$.