You can't just look at the pictures, you have to read the text.

Here in Georgia we are having a normal summer.  Hot and humid with a side of periodic rain deluges.  This is what a Georgia summer looks like.  You look at the numbers (here or here) and there is nothing outside the normal range of things.  

But you listen to the news or look at the heat maps and we are at the end days with everything in deep red shading into mauve.  Those that want to be panicked can dress the picture up into a panicky display.  As long as you don't actually look at the numbers.  

It's a normal Georgia summer.  

Roger Pielke has, as usual, a level headed view of things.  From What the IPCC Actually Says About Extreme Weather by Rober Pielke, Jr.  The subheading is I promise, you'll be utterly shocked.  He is, of course, being drily facetious in his subheading.  

What the IPCC experts say is what they have always said in the appendices where the thousands of pages of detailed expert research reside, calmly isolated from the manipulated and gibbering summaries which the mainstream media only report on.  

The IPCC has concluded that a signal of climate change has not yet emerged beyond natural variability for the following phenomena:

River floods

Heavy precipitation and pluvial floods

Landslides

Drought (all types)

Severe wind storms

Tropical cyclones

Sand and dust storms

Heavy snowfall and ice storms

Hail

Snow avalanche

Coastal flooding

Marine heat waves

Furthermore, the emergence of a climate change signal is not expected under the extreme RCP8.5 scenario by 2100 for any of these phenomena, except heavy precipitation and pluvial floods and that with only medium confidence. Since we know that RCP8.5 is extreme and implausible, that means that there would even less confidence in emergence under a more plausible upper bound, like RCP4.5

The IPCC concludes that, to date, the signal of climate change has emerged in extreme heat and cold spells. The IPCC states:

An increase in heat extremes has emerged or will emerge in the coming three decades in most land regions (high confidence) (Chapter 11; King et al., 2015; Seneviratne and Hauser, 2020), relative to the pre-industrial period, as found by testing significance of differences in distributions of yearly temperature maxima in simulated 20-year periods. In tropical regions, wherever observed changes can be established with statistical significance, and in most mid-latitude regions, there is high confidence that hot and cold extremes have emerged in the historical period, but only medium confidence elsewhere.

Clearly, with the exception perhaps of only extreme heat, the IPCC is badly out of step with today’s apocalyptic zeitgeist. Maybe that is why no one mentions what the IPCC actually says on extreme events. It may also help to explain why a recent paper that arrives at conclusions perfectly consistent with the IPCC is now being retracted with no claims of error or misconduct.

Another way of putting it is that out of 33 possible signals for high confidence in climate change (heating), only five are currently signaling.  Interestingly, if we look out a century, there are forecast only six signals of AGW.  

Even if the IPCC forecasts are your lodestone, there is no need to panic.  All is well.

Double click to enlarge.

But there are many financial and prestige interests invested in panic.  Rise above it. 

Years ago I had a colleague, Kathy H. in the same consulting practice.  An industrial engineer, rock solid smarts and Midwest nice.  We had to give testimony before a state utility commission on some issue.  Our expert testimony was captured in a report of some hundreds of pages of text, data, and graphs.

A couple of us had already testified and the counsel for an interest group had really not been able to get much traction towards making the points that they wanted to make.

When it was Kathy's turn on the stand it was clear that the attorneys thought they had their opportunity to earn their fees.  Among all the hundreds of pages of data tables, textual analysis and graphics, they had seized on one graphic that seemed to support the point they wanted to make.  A graphic Kathy had generated.

They put it to Kathy that her analysis supported their position.  She was having nothing of it as they were misinterpreting the graphic.  The back-and-forth led to my most memorable recollection of courtroom exchanges.  Kathy was a pretty girl from Iowa, professionally attired, confident in her analysis, unflappable and unfailingly polite.  They frumpy and vaguely sleazy New York lawyer clearly felt he was on safe ground.  

Counsel:  But wouldn't you agree that Graph 38 makes our point about the costs.

KH:  No, the accompanying analysis explains the definitions which I think makes it clear why that is not the correct interpretation.

Counsel:  Yes, but the graph clearly shows what we are saying about the costs.

KH:  On the facing page is the description of the analysis and you can see that that is not the case when you read the analysis.

Counsel:  Perhaps, but it is very clear from the graph that we are correct about the costs.

 Without malice, merely an engineer's clarity, Kathy responded.

KH:  No.  You can't just look at the pictures, you have to read the text.

The courtroom erupted in laughter and the counsel moved on.  Later, we all congratulated Kathy on her rapier work.  As for Kathy, I am not sure she ever intended it to sound as it did.  She just wanted him to understand that the text and graphic had to be understood as a whole.

I am sort of reminded of Kathy in that long distance courtroom.  All the rent seekers and vested interests want to fan the flames of panic about AGW.  They need to go back to the IPCC reports - "You can't just look at the pictures, you have to read the text."