Truly inconvenient truths about climate change being ignored: IPCC’s Pachauri says “warming is taking place at a much faster rate”

7 11 2008

UPDATE: 11/10 From the Sydney Morning Herald

Michael Duffy
November 8, 2008

Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC Chairman

Last month I witnessed something shocking. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was giving a talk at the University of NSW. The talk was accompanied by a slide presentation, and the most important graph showed average global temperatures. For the past decade it represented temperatures climbing sharply.

As this was shown on the screen, Pachauri told his large audience: “We’re at a stage where warming is taking place at a much faster rate [than before]“.

Now, this is completely wrong. For most of the past seven years, those temperatures have actually been on a plateau. For the past year, there’s been a sharp cooling. These are facts, not opinion: the major sources of these figures, such as the Hadley Centre in Britain, agree on what has happened, and you can check for yourself by going to their websites. Sure, interpretations of the significance of this halt in global warming vary greatly, but the facts are clear.


Satellite derived lower troposphere temperature since 1979 – Click for a larger image
Reference: UAH lower troposphere data

So it’s disturbing that Rajendra Pachauri’s presentation was so erroneous, and would have misled everyone in the audience unaware of the real situation. This was particularly so because he was giving the talk on the occasion of receiving an honorary science degree from the university.

Below: find out how you can tell Mr. Pachauri directly what you think – he has a blog!

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Categories : climate_change, ridiculae

A Test of Climate, Sun, and Culture Relationships from an 1810-Year Chinese Cave Record

7 11 2008

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/wang2001/fig2.jpg

The graphic above is not from this paper/abstract, nor even the same time frame, but is from this one: A High-Resolution Absolute-Dated Late Pleistocene Monsoon Record from Hulu Cave, China I posted it because it seems relevant to the discussion of the paper below. I’m not an expert on cave and isotope dating, but I thought I’d provide a mix of resources to go along.

Here is some interesting reading. From the abstract, it suggests a correlation between monsoon and medieval warm period etc. But as we often see in papers that touch the edge of skepticism, there’s the obligatory line: “The sign of the correlation between the AM and temperature switches around 1960, suggesting that anthropogenic forcing superseded natural forcing as the major driver of AM changes in the late 20th century.”

I wonder. Here is another paper along the same lines, Holocene variability of the East Asian summer monsoon from Chinese cave records: a re-assessment sans the AGW suggestion.

Here is the link to the abstract below. Unfortunately, the full paper is behind the green wall of the AAA$, even though much of the research is from public institutions. Personally I think charging for access to such papers is flat wrong.

A Test of Climate, Sun, and Culture Relationships from an 1810-Year Chinese Cave Record Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Science, climate_change