1 Recital, Paris Agreement, UNFCCC/CP/2015/L.9, http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2015/cop21/eng/l09.pdf (accessed 18th February 2016). The Agreement is to be distinguished from the Decision of the COP (Conference of Parties, the governing body of the UNFCCC), which precedes it. Pursuant to the UNFCCC, the COP is authorized only to make the ‘decisions necessary to promote the effective implementation of the Convention.’ Article 7(2), UNFCCC. Thus, the decision that precedes the Agreement may be binding with respect to implementation aspects.

2 The parties aim to ‘undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century, on the basis of equity, and in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty.’ Article 4(1), Agreement.

3 Article 4(1), Agreement. Gerrard has suggested that this provision, ‘when closely read, seems to call for the virtual end of fossil fuel use in this century unless there are major advances in carbon sequestration or air capture technology.’ Michael B. Gerrard, Legal Implications of the Paris Agreement for Fossil Fuels, http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/2015/12/19/legal-implications-of-the-paris-agreement-for-fossil-fuels/#sthash.OSCkkkfc.dpuf (accessed 18th February 2016).

4 United Nations Framework Convention On Climate Change. 1992, United Nations. See https://unfccc.int/resource/docs/convkp/conveng.pdf (accessed 18th February 2016).

5 IPCC, 2007. Summary for Policymakers. In: “Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. Emphasis added.

6 Principles Governing IPCC Work, Approved at the Fourteenth Session (Vienna, 1-3 October 1998) on 1 October 1998, amended at the Twenty-First Session (Vienna, 3 and 6-7 November 2003), the Twenty-Fifth Session (Mauritius, 26-28 April 2006), the Thirty-Fifth Session (Geneva, 6-9 June 2012) and the Thirty- Seventh Session (Batumi, 14-18 October 2013), https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/ipcc-principles/ipcc-principles.pdf (emphasis supplied; accessed 18th February 2016).

7 National Research Council of the National Academies. Radiative Forcing of Climate Change. Expanding the Concept and Addressing Uncertainties. 2005. The National Academies Press. Washington, D.C, p. 15.

8 See https://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/definitions-of-global-warming-and-climate-change/ (accessed 18th February 2016).

9 Pielke, R.A. Jr., “Misdefining ‘‘climate change’’: consequences for science and action”, 8 Environmental Science & Policy 548–561 (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also J A Curry, P J Webster and G J Holland ‘Mixing politics and science in testing the hypothesis that greenhouse warming is causing a global increase in hurricane intensity’ Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 1025–37 (August 2006).

10 See further W.M. Briggs, Natural Variations In Weather Do Not Explain The ‘Pause’: Update, With Letter to Nature, Feb. 5, 2015, http://wmbriggs.com/post/15201/ (accessed 18th February 2016).

11 L. Bergkamp & J.C. Hanekamp, “European Food Law and the Precautionary Principle – Paradoxical Effects of the EU's Precautionary Food Policies,” In: Kai Purnhagen & Harry Bremmers, Food Law and Economics. Springer Verlag (forthcoming).

12 COP-21 Decision, under 21. According to Hulme, “the UNFCCC’s invitation raises the issue of whether the IPCC is in a position to deliver such a report in 2018, and if so, whether its assessment would be useful and robust. More generally, the invitation refocuses attention on the function and status of the IPCC as an institution that mediates between climate science, governance and policy and, more broadly, questions how the interactions between knowledge and values in environmental geopolitics are conceived and navigated.” Hulme, Mike, 1.5 °C and climate research after the Paris Agreement, Nature Climate Change, Vol. 6, March 2016, pp. 222–224.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 COP-21 Decision, under 100.

14 ‘[I]t was not until 1995 [i.e. after the UNFCCC and IPCC had been created, JH & LB] that the IPCC 2nd Assessment Report identified a ‘discernible’ human influence on global climate.’ J.A. Curry, “Statement to the Committee on Science, Space and Technology of the United States House of Representatives’ Hearing on ‘The president's U.N. Climate pledge”, (15 April 2015).

15 Article 2, UNFCCC. It provides that ‘[s]uch a level should be achieved within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.’ This objective is based on the findings that ‘human activities have been substantially increasing the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, that these increases enhance the natural greenhouse effect, and that this will result on average in an additional warming of the Earth's surface and atmosphere and may adversely affect natural ecosystems and humankind.’ Emphasis added.

16 See Pielke, R. Jr., The Climate Fix What Scientists and Politicians Won't Tell You About Global Warming, Basic Books, New York: 2010.Google Scholar

17 See further: Stenmark, M., Scientism. Science, Ethics and Religion, Ashgate Publishing Limited, Aldershot, England: 2001 Google Scholar. Hayek, F.A., Scientism and the Study of Society. Part II, 10(37) Economica New Series, 34–63 (1943)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Polanyi, M., The Two Cultures, Encounter: 61–65 (September 1959).Google Scholar

18 Curry calls this ‘[t]he ‘policy cart’ (…) leading the scientific ‘horse.’’ J.A. Curry, “Statement to the Committee on Science, Space and Technology of the United States House of Representatives’ Hearing on ‘The president's U.N. Climate pledge’ (15 April 2015)”. Darwall has argued that ‘bias in the IPCC is endemic.’ Darwall, Rubert, The Age of Global Warming: A History, London: Quartet Books, 2013, p. 348.Google Scholar

19 Report of the Second Session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Nairobi, 28 June 1989, https://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session02/second-session-report.pdf

20 As Beck observes, the IPCC leadership acts ‘in an overtly political manner while simultaneously claiming to be disengaged from politics.’ She poses the rhetorical question ‘why the prevailing form of leadership [is] not openly challenged by participating scientists and governments.’ Beck, S., “Between Tribalism and Trust: The IPCC Under the ‘Public Microscope,’” 7(2) Nature and Culture, Summer 151–173.Google Scholar

21 Pielke, note 9. See further Stenmark, M., Scientism. Science, Ethics and Religion, Ashgate Publishing Limited, Aldershot, England: 2001.Google Scholar

22 Bergkamp, L., “Adjudicating scientific disputes in climate science: the limits of judicial competence and the risks of taking sides”, 3 Environmental Liability, 80–102 (2015).Google Scholar

23 Pielke, note 9.

24 Rial, J.A., Pielke, R.A. Sr., Beniston, M., Claussen, M., Canadell, J., Cox, P., Held, H., de Noblet-Ducoudre, N., Prinn, R., Reynolds, J., & Salas, J.D., “Nonlinearities, feedbacks and critical thresholds within the Earth's climate system” 65 Climatic Change, 11–38 (2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 As Pielke Sr. has stated, ‘[t]hese forcings are spatially heterogeneous and include the effect of aerosols on clouds and associated precipitation (…), the influence of aerosol deposition (e.g., black carbon (soot) ( …) and reactive nitrogen (…), and the role of changes in land use/land cover (…) Among their effects is their role in altering atmospheric and ocean circulation features away from what they would be in the natural climate system (…) As with CO2, the lengths of time that they affect the climate are estimated to be on multidecadal time scales and longer.’ Pielke, R. Sr., “Climate Change: The Need to Consider Human Forcings Besides Greenhouse Gases,” 90(45) Eos, 413–414 (2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 Article 4(1), Paris Agreement.

27 The term “climate models” is used here to refer the full range of models used in connection with climate policy-making, including General Circulation Models and Integrated Assessment Models (the latter are economic models). See generally IPCC, What is a GCM?, http://www.ipcc-data.org/guidelines/pages/gcm_guide.html, and IPCC, Working Group III: Mitigation, 7.6.4 Integrated Assessment Models, http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg3/index.php?idp=311.

28 Humphreys, P., Extending Ourselves: Computational Science, Empiricism, and Scientific Method. Oxford University Press, Oxford: 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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30 For further discusssion, see for instance, Essex, Christopher & McKitrick, Ross, Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy, and Politics of Global Warming, Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2008 Google Scholar. Abbot, John et al., Climate Change: The Facts, Woodsville, NH: Stockade Books, 2015.Google Scholar

31 To assess the economic/social cost of carbon, integrated assessment models have been built. These models receive their inputs from the climate models.

32 Lewis, N., Curry, J.A., “The implications for climate sensitivity of AR5 forcing and heat uptake estimates”, 45(3) Climate Dynamics, 1009–1023.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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34 Testimony of John R. Christy, University of Alabama in Huntsville. U.S. House Committee on Science, Space & Technology, 2 Feb 2016. Christy underlined that ‘for the global bulk atmosphere, the models overwarm the atmosphere by a factor of about 2.5. … the models over-warm the tropical atmosphere by a factor of approximately 3, (Models +0.265, Satellites +0.095, Balloons +0.073 °C/decade) again indicating the current theory is at odds with the facts.’

35 IPCC, 2013, Note 37, p. 769.

36 Global warming slowdown: No systematic errors in climate models (2015, February 2). Retrieved 9 February 2016 from http://phys.org/news/2015-02-global-slowdown-systematic-errors-climate.html. See further: Marotzke, J. & Forster, P.M., “Forcing, feedback and internal variability in global temperature trends”, 517 Nature, 565–570 (2015)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

37 Jeff Tollefson, Global warming ‘hiatus’ debate flares up again: Researchers now argue that slowdown in warming was real, Nature, 24 February 2016, doi:10.1038/nature.2016.19414, http://www.nature.com/news/global-warming-hiatus-debate-flares-up-again-1.19414 (“There is this mismatch between what the climate models are producing and what the observations are showing,” quoting John Fyfe). Fyfe, John C. et al., Making sense of the early-2000s warming slowdown, Nature Climate Change 2016, 6, pp. 224–228 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, doi:10.1038/nclimate2938 (published online 24 February 2016) (“It has been claimed that the early-2000s global warming slowdown or hiatus, characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations. The evidence presented here contradicts these claims.”) See also Ronald Bailey, Global Warming Hiatus Is Real, Feb. 24, 2016, http://reason.com/blog/2016/02/24/global-warming-hiatus-is-real (“the fact that global average temperature increases have been considerably slower during the first years of this century than most climate models projected”).

38 Meehl, G.A., Arblaster, J.M., Fasullo, J.T., Hu, A. & Trenberth, K.E., “Model-based evidence of deep-ocean heat uptake during surface temperature hiatus periods”, 1 Nature Climate Change, 360–364 (2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Douville, H., Voldoire, A., & Geoffroy, O., “The recent global warming hiatus: What is the role of Pacific variability?”, 42 Geophysical Research Letters, 880–888 (2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Llovel, W., Willis, J. K., Landerer, F. W. & Fukumori, I., “Deep-ocean contribution to sea level and energy budget not detectable over the past decade”, 4 Nature Climate Change, 1031–1035 (2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 Such models combine key elements of biophysical and economic systems into one integrated system. See http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg3/index.php?idp=311

40 Ronald Bailey, Global Warming Hiatus Is Real, Feb. 24, 2016, http://reason.com/blog/2016/02/24/global-warming-hiatus-is-real (“There have been scores of studies that have tried to explain away this inconvenient fact [of the hiatus].”)

41 “I have been expecting to start seeing papers on the ‘hiatus is over.’ Instead I am seeing papers on ‘the hiatus never happened.’” See https://judithcurry.com/2015/09/17/hiatus-revisionism/ (accessed 18th February 2016).

42 Ron Bailey, Global Warming Hiatus Is Real, Feb. 24, 2016, http://reason.com/blog/2016/02/24/global-warming-hiatus-is-real

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