More Problems with the IPCC Report

A couple day ago I reported on some cracks in the Global Warming consensus being included in a draft of the the next IPCC report.  Well, somehow in my excitement to get the post together I simply missed one of the most important, the new draft makes some concessions to the notion that the sun, and the solar sunspot cycle in particular, may actually be playing a significant role in climate changes:

Compared to the First Order Draft, the SOD now adds the following sentence, indicated in bold (page 7-43, lines 1-5, emphasis added):

Many empirical relationships have been reported between GCR or cosmogenic isotope archives and some aspects of the climate system (e.g., Bond et al., 2001; Dengel et al., 2009; Ram and Stolz, 1999). The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link. We focus here on observed relationships between GCR and aerosol and cloud properties.

The Chapter 7 authors are admitting strong evidence (“many empirical relationships”) for enhanced solar forcing (forcing beyond total solar irradiance, or TSI), even if they don’t know what the mechanism is. This directly undercuts the main premise of the report, as stated in Chapter 8 (page 8-4, lines 54-57):...

This is an important concession.  If changes in the sun are accounting for changes in climate, the role of CO2 in their previous model, which neglected any changes in the sun, are necessarily less.  In other words, the models are wrong (well, models are always wrong, the only question is by how much and why).  I've had several previous posts on the solar cycle issue.

The second problem is with the IPCC's predictions of methane.  Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, and predictions of increases in methane concentration, as a result of increased temperatures causing  more methane production from biological sources (rot) and from dissolution of methane hydrates from sediments as water temperature rises has been a significant term in the Global Climate Models predictions of increased temperature, the generating a positive feed back loop to intensify warming.  However, atmospheric methane concentrations have not been rising at anywhere near the rates predicted by the models.

You know, if some of their predictions occasionally understated the observed temperature effects, you might think it was honest error