From CO2 Coalition

By Kees de Lange

Does the IPCC represent a reliable scientific organization? In the meantime, many scientists have convincingly demonstrated that the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is not a reliable scientific organization. It does not hurt to give a brief overview of the considerations.

Let’s start with the mission of the IPCC. The aim is to show that the human influence on the climate is disastrous. This is not a balanced scientific question, but an ideologically tinted approach.

If there were indeed an existential climate crisis, you would bring in the best physicists to tackle that problem. IPCC members are put forward by the government, and you won’t find any skeptics in those circles. In fact, the pallbearers are usually not scientists with an impressive track record, but political followers.

IPCC reports are hardly read, except for the summaries for policymakers. These are created by a show of hands, where the hands are raised by the above-mentioned government representatives. That is a parody of natural science.

The IPCC is guided by climate models. Moreover, the IPCC has specific ideas about which factors determine the climate. In doing so, all kinds of factors that probably play an important role are omitted in advance. Not my idea of independent responsible science. Let’s first look at the IPCC modeling. First of all, passages on the KNMI and IPCC websites of the climate state.

“Internal variations of the climate system beyond monthly timescales, apart from the contribution of the positive trend in multi-decade surface temperature that is currently prominent (Oldenborgh et al. 2012) and oceanic variability (Hazeleger et al. 2013), are difficult to predict and on timescales of 30 to 100 years, useful predictions are basically impossible. Not only because of the large contribution of natural variability, but also because the external forcing related to human activities is considered unpredictable. Any attempt to make climate predictions on a relatively small spatial scale, such as the Netherlands or even Western Europe, for several decades ahead, is not expected to yield useful results.” The KNMI therefore concludes that predictions and expectations are not possible and that climate predictions do not lead to useful results. TheIPCC says: “Scenarios are images of the future, or alternative futures. They are not predictions or forecasts. Rather, each scenario is an alternative view of how the future might unfold. A series of scenarios helps to understand possible future developments of complex systems. Some systems, which are well understood and for which complete information is available, can be modeled with some certainty, as is often the case in the natural sciences, and their future states can be predicted. However, many physical and social systems are poorly understood, and the information about the relevant variables is so incomplete that they can only be understood by intuition and are best communicated through images and stories. Predictions are not possible in such cases.”

By the way, these passages have disappeared from the websites in question!

Greenhouse Gases

Greenhouse gases, especially CO2, are the IPCC’s bad guy. In reality, water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse gas, but that is not opportune, so it is concealed. There is also a logarithmic dependence between the concentration of a greenhouse gas and the resulting warming. In practice, there
is less and less warming with ever higher greenhouse gas concentrations.

This realization is old. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, an astrophysicist who worked on radiation transfer in stellar atmospheres around 1960, developed the theory. Chandrasekhar won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983. The Dutchman Wim Witteman made an important contribution, and pioneering work has been done by Van Wijngaarden and Happer with beautiful mathematical 2n stream techniques.

The ICC also recognizes the logarithmic dependence, but you will not find it in the summary for policymakers. Nevertheless, this result is crucial. Ultimately, when the CO2 content is doubled, the climate sensitivity increases by a small 1%. Hardly a reason for a crisis.

The forcing as a result of greenhouse gases can be well calculated with AMO physics. What is much less known is the climate sensitivity: how much forcing causes how much warming and where. More and more it is becoming clear that this climate sensitivity (including the alleged feedback by water vapor) was heavily overestimated in the past. There is an extensive literature on this.

I refer to the publications below to underline the above points (and more). In these links you will also find a multitude of references and graphs.

We-Can-Still-Avoid-the-Net-Zero-Trap.pdf

The heat flows into the atmosphere due to greenhouse gases are not the most important heat flows on our planet. In the atmosphere, the Hadley cells are at least as important. The sea currents also transport a multitude of heat compared to the atmosphere because of the enormous heat capacity of water.

Due to the focus of IPCC on CO2, other factors that influence the climate are conveniently forgotten: the role of the sun, Milankovics cycles, etc. It is therefore striking that the “predictions” of models deviate very strongly from the observations. Following Feynman, the models are apparently incorrect. This conclusion is a no go for the IPCC.

In the links above, I will discuss all kinds of factors in more detail. The conclusion that the IPCC is a political and not a scientific body is confirmed on every point.

The Failure of IPCC

At first glance, measuring the Earth’s temperature seems like a trivial matter. You stick a thermometer in the soil and read it regularly, and you’re done. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. How representative are those measurements if the measuring points are not evenly distributed over the earth’s surface in sufficient numbers? Around 1850 there was only a somewhat comprehensive network in North America and parts of Europe. To this day, the number of measuring stations in Antarctica is extremely limited. Why do the measuring points that change regularly give a true picture of the entire earth’s surface? So, they don’t do that.

Many of the current measuring stations were previously located in places where the temperature disturbance was small. Nowadays, cities have advanced far beyond their original boundaries, and monitoring stations are now located in places (in suburbs, near airports, etc.) that do not meet the scientific requirements for the placement of measuring stations. This Urban Island effect is significant and a significant part of the warming formulated by the IPCC is due to it.

IPCC actually only talks about warming of the planet as a result of CO2, and uses the average temperature of the earth’s surface as a benchmark. This position has curious consequences. If you calculate the average of the temperature in Greenland and in the Sahara, then of course you get figure. but unfortunately, meaningless numbers that have nothing to do with climate. No one lives under such average temperatures, so the relevance to humanity of such an approach is nil.

Another sore point where the IPCC fails concerns climate models. Making those models is a purely theoretical exercise, but the real test is of course the comparison with hard observations. Since 1978, have been able to measure the temperatures of layers in the troposphere with the help of satellites. Measurements with balloons also play a role. The model predictions show very large differences (up to factor of 3) with the theoretical models. The simple truth is therefore that the models should be rejected.

To make matters worse, the IPCC has had to acknowledge that the most extreme models (the RPC 8.5 global warming scenario), which were routinely put forward by alarmists as “business as usual”, are now finally qualified as very unlikely after many years of criticism by skeptics. This pretty much means the death knell for the credibility of these kinds of models and their alarmist proponents.

The above is only an anthology of the problems that years of faith and trust in the IPCC have brought The conclusion is gradually inescapable that the IPC is an ideological construct and certainly not a scientifically reliable organization.

Actually, we already know enough when we listen to the recent words of António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres, the ninth secretary of the United Nations and someone who certainly does not excel in his knowledge of physics:

“The era of global warming has ended, and we are now in the era of global boiling”. I rest my case.” – António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres

It would be useful to give an overview of ALL the reasons why the IPCC is unreliable. Above I gave a small anthology, but there is a mer a boire on this point. If there is interest in making an attempt to do so, please let me know.

Originally published at Climate Gate.NL, August 15, 2026.

Dr. C.A. de Lange is a CO2 Coalition member and Guest Professor in the Faculty of Science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and was a Member of the Senate in The Netherlands from 7 June 2011 until 1 May 2015 as well as the Chairman of The Netherlands Organization for Pensions from 12 May 2009 until 10 January 2011. He has a PhD in Theoretical Chemistry from the University of Bristol (UK) in June 1969 with a Dissertation on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance in Oriented Molecules.