UPDATE: 11/10 From the Sydney Morning Herald
Michael Duffy
November 8, 2008
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!
Later that night, on ABC TV’s Lateline program, Pachauri claimed that those who disagree with his own views on global warming are “flat-earthers” who deny “the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence”. But what evidence could be more important than the temperature record, which Pachauri himself had fudged only a few hours earlier?
In his talk, Pachauri said the number of global warming sceptics is shrinking, a curious claim he was unable to substantiate when questioned about it on Lateline. Still, there’s no doubt a majority of climate scientists agree with the view of the IPCC.
Today I want to look at why this might be so: after all, such a state of affairs presents a challenge to sceptics such as me. If we’re right, then an awful lot of scientists are wrong. How could this be?
This question was addressed in September in a paper by Professor Richard Lindzen, of the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen, probably the most qualified prominent global-warming sceptic, suggested that a number of changes in the way science is conducted have contributed to the rise of climate alarmism among American scientists.
Lindzen believes another problem with climate science is that in America and Europe it is heavily colonised by environmental activists.
Here are just two examples that indicate the scale of the problem: the spokesman for the American Meteorological Society is a former staffer for Al Gore, and realclimate.org, probably the world’s most authoritative alarmist web site, was started by a public relations firm serving environmental causes.
None of this is necessarily sinister, but the next time you hear a scientist or scientific organisation warning of climate doom, you might want to follow the money trail. Sceptics are not the only ones who have received funding from sources sympathetic to their viewpoint. (And yes, Lindzen did once receive some money from energy companies.)
Lindzen claims that scientific journals play an important role in promoting global warming alarmism, and gives a number of examples.
Someone else who’s looked closely at scientific journals (although not specifically those dealing with climate science) is epidemiologist John Ioannidis of the Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston. He reached the surprising conclusion that most published research findings are proved false within five years of their publication. (Lest he be dismissed as some eccentric, I note that the Economist recently said Ioannidis has made his case “quite convincingly”.)
Why might this be so? Later work by Ioannidis and colleagues suggests that these days journal editors are more likely to publish research that will make a splash than that which will not. They do this to sell more copies of their publications and of reprints of papers in it. Ioannidis believes these publication practices might be distorting science.
It’s possible the forces described by Lindzen and Ioannidis have imbued climate science with a preference for results that involve (or seem to involve) disastrous change rather than stability. Rajenda Pachauri’s recent Sydney lecture suggests that in this relatively new field, inconvenient truths to the contrary are not welcome.
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have you seen this http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s1848641.htm
reporter is a little bias at the end i think?
[…] thing for someone already so well known, well positioned, to do (hence the exclamation marks from Wattsupwiththat). It is also not that sophisticated as a portfolio site. Perhaps the process of leading the IPCC […]
Fatbigot — two thumbs up.
It is good to see what’s next, the investment in the AGW scam is so high, it’s now just moving forward on 100% lies.
Steve Berry also gets two thumbs up, yep, just a liar.
As crosspatch cites above, this has always been more about politics than science. To think this guy stood on the stage with Al “carbon credits” Gore. It’s painfully obvious by now that Europe is grappling with the loss of competitiveness resulting from their green agenda, the overheads from carbon credits & a renewable energy crash program is hurting EU competitiveness.
It goes beyond that, the manufacture of an equivalent good in Asia emits 40% more CO2 than in the West, so if these green policies self-inflict job & manufacturing loss to India & China, the result will be *more* CO2 emissions, not less!
India & China, OTOH, are grappling with massive poverty, so any cost (read: green) overhead will take food out of the mouth of babies. Under the UNEP CDM programs India & China would get compensation for clean coal, but under the IPCC claim of CO2’s pernicity, the absence of aerosols from clean coal would accelerate climate change!
Aside from these internal contradictions, how Pachauri can make this claim amazes me, it’s in contravention of yet another recent paper from Keenlyside forecasting 10 more years of stable temperatures. But since this is climatology newspeak – that an ongoing (and unexpected) temperature stability inheres exponential pay-back later – it makes a weird kind of sense.
Heck, even the simplest trend analysis belies these claims of accelerated warming:
http://tinyurl.com/co2trend
http://tinyurl.com/co2trend2
“The western countries are for more than 90% responsible for combined CO2 emissions done over the past centuries. It would be morally untenable to not hold those same western countries repsonsible for the problem.”
What problem? There is actual, factual evidence that increases in CO2 levels are wholly beneficial and substantially increase crop productivity, something sorely need with a burgeoning world population. There is also evidence that increased CO2 levels cause an increase in water utilization efficiency in plants, resulting in more drought tolerance. There is little evidence, however, that CO2 can or ever will cause a “runaway” greenhouse effect or even enough of an enhanced greenhouse effect to negatively impact the planet. The problem is that most “experts” like the guy mentioned above cite computer model output as “evidence”, which is clearly NOT evidence but fanciful prognostication.
“I have complete faith in humen ingenuity to develop the technology needed to reduce CO2 emissions without sinking our economies or even noticeably affecting our way of life.”
Well, you have more “faith” in the government to solve the “problem” than I do. When has ANY GOVERNMENT ANYWHERE successfully solved a “problem” of this magnitude? I, too, believe we can successfully reduce CO2 emissions without significantly impacting lifestyles; however, emissions trading schemes won’t accomplish that goal and absolutely WILL cripple economies as energy prices and all associated goods and services manufactured with energy skyrocket. I also have NO CONFIDENCE that governments worldwide will implement those solutions that will keep energy plentiful and cheap while aimlessly reducing CO2 emissions (i.e., vastly expanded nuclear power generation).
The first stage after the implementation of an ETS in developed countries will be that companies will ship as many manufacturing jobs as possible overseas to countries that do NOT have an ETS in place. How does that help developed economies?? It doesn’t and can’t!!. Eventually, if this insanity continues long enough, the blight that the ETS brings on developed countries will spread to currently developing countries until every nation has an ETS in place. So, in effect, the imposition of ETS systems around the world will eventually lead to either a shutdown of the global economy as we know it today or the lopping off of politicians’ heads (both literal and figurative) worldwide. Imagine the “unfair”, or more properly “strategic”, trade advantage that would befall just ONE nation if they decided to forego the implementation of a costly, ineffectual, national ETS. Are we willing to wage war on countries not willing to commit economic suicide by ETS?
“No he did not say that. He said that it is of secondary importance. Stick to the facts.”
Well, if the “problem” is of secondary importance for developing nations, then it is not really a problem at all unless developed nations are gullible enough to enact such schemes (which all current indications tend to point to such gullibility). People in developed nations need to WAKE UP and think through the logical consequences of the implementation of global environmental restrictions on the economy. We truly are facing a potential manmade disaster of epic proportions and that disaster is NOT potential trivial warming due to increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
Steve B:
If his lie is supposed to be this: “We’re at a stage where warming is taking place at a much faster rate [than before]“, then it’s not based at all on the last 10 years -it’s based on the proxy reconstructions of Mann and others. In terms of climate change a flattening of the last ten years could very easily be a blip so you naturally look farther back. Now while we both happen to think that these reconstructions are flawed and that the current plateau is just as likely to be a turning point and that temperature is heading back down, these scientists have a lot of psychological motivations for their belief. Not the least of which is the incredible powerful inbuilt human instinct to believe a rising trend will keep rising. It doesn’t make it a lie – only self-delusion at best. What you see depends on where you stand. I’m pretty sure that most of you guys only looked closer at the data for one reason – you don’t like taxes under any circumstances. People with less objections to taxes haven’t looked closer so they believe what the newspapers say: Very natural human behavior.
Ron de Haan
“If climate is your job and you provide false information to serve an agenda that will harm economies and populations, you are not only a liar but a crook too. In the past we were forced to wage wars because of characters like Pachauri.”
You’re wearing pink glasses too, otherwise you’d notice that the USA is currently fighting a war which was based entirely on lies. So yes you are definitely correct that we wage wars because of lies. But is it always down to evil or just delusional thinking? You decide, but remember it cuts two ways when you take your own blinkers off.
Anne:
Here’s the problem: At what point are they responsible? Before the knowledge that CO2 might pose a pernicious emission?
What of the post-War boom in global trade in Asia & the Mid East that went along with the boom in fossil fuel use? Araby sold a great deal of oil & yet they’re exempt as well despite being immediate beneficiaries.
And as the West loses competitiveness to Asia from globalization and Asian industrialization, we’re also supposed to bear green burdens alone? Green taxes will create yet more incentives to move jobs & production abroad. The internal contradiction in your thinking arises almost instantaneously however, since an equivalent good manufactured in China realizes 40% more CO2 emissions than were it manufactured in the West.
So even from a practical standpoint the notion that the West is more culpable in the short term is flawed, never mind the question as to how much threat is in fact posed by CO2 emissions.
Ok…this is OT…but it’s pretty funny, and seems to be well done…
Gore’s new blog:
http://www.aninconvenientblog.org/
Jim
The present worldwide economic downturn has affected the extremists’ plans for the near term.
► Expensive solutions to questionable problems requires an excess of capital investment that is not available
► Data defies dogma: enough observational and anecdotal information brings into question the hypothesis of global warming and the notion of the economic soundness of a cap and scam system
► Repetition of incongruities as proof weakens dogma: global warming causes global cooling does not ring true… and becomes irrelevant… when people are facing colder winters with more expensive fuel such as natural gas which is expected to rise 6-10% in cost in many places… and have less means to pay for it.
PE Obama made a major gaffe when he proclaimed that he was willing to bankrupt any company that attempted to build a new coal-fired power plant in the U.S. [though no mention of sanctions against China came out]. We need to suffer for our beliefs… was the message he proclaimed. Economic hardship and a lower standard of living was necessary to offset a hypothetical problem.
Political climate science and economic realities don’t align.
http://hallofrecord.blogspot.com/2008/11/reducing-co2-through-suffering.html
Stefan (05:01:39) :
I have learned from my parents that if I make a mess of things, I should clean up. I am trying to teach my own kids the same values.
The net result of all of these is to hobble the US economy while the economy of the rest of the world surges ahead. This is all part of the conspiracy by the rest of the world to economically weaken the US, so that the tinpot dictators of the 3rd world can take over and impose their own brands of morality. Pachchauri has already advocated veganism ot solve AGW.
However, Pachchauri can rest now, while the conspiracy to weaken and hobble the US will be lead and directed from the Whitehouse
Comment to
Dr. R. K. Pauchari’s Blog of November 4, 2008. “Can Civil Society be Srengthened to Achieve Sustainable Development?”
“Our existentially critical need is to develop alternative fuels for growing population and economic growth in the face of declining light oil. Funding climate control will directly deny funds urgently needed to develop alternative fuels. Carbon sequestration is a huge black hole consuming enormous funds with negligible returns. It would cause massive depression and starvation.
Your carbon taxes or Cap and Trade directly harm the poor.
They multiply irrigation and fertilizer costs causing starvation.
They dry up discretionary income and increase unemployment.
There is growing evidence that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and solar cycles modulating cosmic rays dominate global temperature changes. Tropospheric temperatures are cooling, not warming. Demand objective science with statistically verifiable climate models.
Our critical need is to develop alternative fuels faster than declining light oil.
Nepal, Eritrea, and Zimbabwe have run out of fuel causing massive economic damage. OPEC production cuts extorted far more from developing countries than from ALL developmental aid. The impact of climate change is negligible by comparison.
I urge you to prioritize feeding the poor and fuels to sustain economic growth above all else, especially for Bangladesh and other developing countries.
Dr. David L. Hagen”
Katherine (05:17:14) :
You’re taking it as given that CO2 is responsible for “global warming,” and that “global warming” is a problem.
Correct. I believe the first part of this statement is true. As for the second part, it is largely undecided what will exactly happen where and when. I have concluded that that is a gamble I am not willing to take.
Until it’s proven that the human-produced additions of CO2 to the atmosphere is responsible for “global warming,”…
Whether it is ‘proven’ or not is irrelevant. Do you need proof that you will develop serious health problems next year before taking a health insurance? All decisions suffer uncertainties. Excluding information will almost certainly decrease the quality of a decision.
Plus studies have shown that warmer temperatures result in climate conditions that benefit agricultural production (e.g., stronger monsoons), while cooler temperatures tend to cause drought and famine. How can “global warming” be considered a problem in that light?
The consequences of climate change are not all negative. Nobody in the AGW camp disputes that. But the question is: do the postives outweigh the negatives? Do you have proof of that?
Tim Lambert has posted the video:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/10/rajendra_pachauri_to_speak_at.php
The section that so ‘shocked’ Duffy is between 16:00 and 18:30. Judge for yourselves if a comparison with the last 7 years is good journalism, and indeed let us remind ourselves what the first ‘C’ in IPCC stands for ….
REPLY: Note to readers, Tim Lambert has not shown a tendency towards balanced analysis, so take it with a grain of salt. – Anthony
JamesG
I’m pretty sure that most of you guys only looked closer at the data for one reason – you don’t like taxes under any circumstances. People with less objections to taxes haven’t looked closer so they believe what the newspapers say: Very natural human behavior.
That is a bizarre, and pretty outrageous claim to make, James. Pretty neat trick, that of branding everyone here, based on nothing more than your own blinders. The truth is people have many reasons for looking closer. I only looked to be better able to refute anti-AGW letters to the editor. My only agenda was proving AGW was true. Surprise, surprise, it was all smoke and mirrors, and yes, lies. Like it or not, repeating a lie which you believe in no way absolves you from the fact that you are spreading lies, no matter what the motivation is. Usually, it’s is some combination money, political power, and professional ego.
Pachauri is a liar whose lies will, and already have had negative impacts on humanity. May he burn in aitch e hockeysticks2, or wherever he’s going.
PearlandAggie (06:52:51) :
What problem? There is actual, factual evidence that increases in CO2 levels are wholly beneficial and substantially increase crop productivity,…
This is only true if that crop is not constrained by other factors, like soil nutrients or water. But indeed there may be benefits to higher CO2 levels. I don’t dispute that, climate scientists don’t dispute that.
Well, you have more “faith” in the government to solve the “problem” than I do.
And then you spend 20 lines attacking a statement I did not make. You should learn to read, I wrote: “I have complete faith in humen ingenuity”
We truly are facing a potential manmade disaster of epic proportions and that disaster is NOT potential trivial warming due to increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
I thought that alarmism was the hallmark of the AGW crowd.
eric
Re Swindle … Are there any factual errors or any misleading parts of this documentary? For the most part, I can’t find anything to complain about.
There is an analysis of the many problems with the film here …http://www.ofcomswindlecomplaint.net/
JP.
REPLY: For balance, here is a detailed analysis of the many problems with Gores Inconvenient Truth movie here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2007/10/04/detailed-comments-on-an-inconvenient-truth/
-Anthony
eric (05:39:22) :
“It seems to me the film implied that when we look at the past 400,000 years and see changes in atmospheric CO2 following rather than leading temperature changes, it means the oceans act as a sink for CO2, releasing more when it warms up, and absorbing CO2 when it cools down. That may be true in history, but that does not seem to be happening today. CO2 in the ocean is slightly increasing, if I’m not mistaken. The increased CO2 in the atmosphere is not primarily coming from the oceans this time around. Is my analysis correct?”
I do not know if anybody has replied to your query, and I have not seen the DVD.
The skeptics claim is that CO2 is behaving as it has behaved the last 400.000 years, coming out of the ocean after the increase in temperature. The anthropogenic contribution ( from oil and coal) is a small part of this increase. Some comes from animals and forest fires and land clearance so that would also be anthropogenic. The warmers think that Co2 lingers for decades in the atmosphere, if not centuries. The skeptics give a lifetime of five or ten years. If cooling/stasis continues for another ten years we will have one more datum on which side is right because the cooling oceans should be absorbing more CO2, and the CO2 curve should flatten.
In addition the skeptics are right that the level of CO2 at the moment is barely adequate for the flora of the planet. Levels below 150ppm and the plants would die. Plants thrive in greenhouses with 1000ppm.
The problem is all the smoothing and all the averaging that goes on.
Pachauri’s chart is a 5-year moving average of annual temperatures. If you cut the averaging off at 2007 (2008 isn’t finished yet of course) you can get a line going up.
But the climate varies alot. It goes up and down and the warmers like to convienently cut out all the downs in their analysis.
The monthly variability should not be ignored since it also contains alot of information that is useful to explaining what is happening.
If you plot the monthly Nino 3.4 anomaly against the global temperature anomaly, there is a very, very strong correlation. Global temperatures follow the PDO – Nino Index (with a 3 or 4 month lag) directly and continuously. The Nino temps vary more than global temps so a good rule of thumb is that changes in the Nino anomaly of 3 months ago times 15% to 20% is very closely matched to the global anomaly change this month. Plot this monthly over 70 years like I have and you will be convinced.
In the last five years (cutting 2008 out of course) we have mostly been in a positive PDO-Nino and thus temps as annual averages have been increasing. They started falling drastically about 20 months ago when a La Nina appeared but the warmers can just ignore that for now.
JamesG:
Hyperbole solves nothing here.
And the USA war you’re referring to, I assume, is Iraq. It was not “based entirely on lies.” There was evidence found of active Plutonium refinement found at al Tuwaitha (never mind there was enough high-grade U235 to make two shotgun nukes), there were chemical munitions which had been disguised as conventional ones, the colocation of chemical precursors near chemical munitions was not coincidental and the prospect of a post-sanctions Iraq in which yet more Kurds & Swamp Arabs were subjected to genocide was very real.
Neither Bush nor Colin Powell ever claimed the prospect of an imminent nuclear weapon, just as Iran may not have a working one w/in a decade. But Hans Blix looked the other way when Kim Jung Il pulled the wool over his eyes, so what were the leaders of the USA – in a post-9/11 world – supposed to think? That letting Iraq fester in a mire of diversion of food money would result in anything positive?
The greatest errors can be shown to be Bush following the advice of Colin Powell, et al, in letting large divisions of the Iraqi army escape in Spring 2003, and Rumsfeld’s intransigence in stepping up control against what became a proxy battlefield against al Qaeda. This led to years of Saddamist insurgents committing wanton slaughter and internacine recriminations.
The biggest lie is from American Democrats who’ve acted as though they didn’t know what was coming, how the war would evolve, or whether some of the pre-war claims being made were based on shoddy, unclassified, data that was in fact unsubstantially wrong.
I don’t see the good Doctor allowing my comment on his blog, but we’ll see. Here is what I submitted.
“I have not seen any evidence that many Americans were voting on the climate change issue, and I also can’t say the American people as a whole have a major difference with the current policies.
Just what is the policy you’d like to see announced? I say this with the knowledge that last six years have shown no warming, and the last year or more indicates a pronounced cooling trend is underway.
I think common ground can be found with the current economic crisis. A crisis with roots deep in risky lending policies, but triggered by a rapid rise in energy prices over the last few years.
Yet I’m fairly certain you are advocating policies that will constrain the supply of energy and further drive up prices. Many proposed initiatives such as carbon trading and sequestration will take limited resources away from renewables and nuclear. These initiatives and policies will constrain supply, force price increases and ultimately lead to further economic turmoil, which will reduce the resources available to new developments.
With the policies you advocate, you can’t get to your destination. You need to find the middle ground, and that is in energy independence. Policies that increase the domestic supply, increase the use of renewables and nuclear, increase conservation, while lowering costs and boosting economy as a whole.”
-George
p.s. to my (08:06:24) :
Have a look through the satellite measurements of CO2
http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/story_archive/Measuring_CO2_from_Space/
If you have a fast connection there is an instructive animation you can find further in the link.
The increase in CO2 is less than 2ppm at the moment. The world map has a width of 20ppm.
There is a lot of CO2 in a band in the southern hemisphere, and a spike in the antarctic. This talks of CO2 emitted by volcanic activity, which has not been well documented. There are continuous discoceries of undewater vents and volcanoes that go unreported. The complete CO2 story is not really available for us.
I think what we are seeing is the beginning of a scientific ‘McCarthiest’ period regarding AGW skeptics. I can well imagine Dr Hansen sitting before the next Congress saying, “I have here a list….”
It seems that the movement to suppress those that do not accept the gospel has begun and, I fear, will become worse as time goes on.
back in the day, why, I recall the misapplied quoting of Ike’s military/industrial complex speech by those who were convinced they were intellectually superior to Reagan.
There is only one way that speech would have been (mis)taken. It was very irresponsible to have made it in the first place. It hurt the American position in the Cold War badly, both at home and abroad. To this day it sets my teeth on edge just thinkin’ about it. Nuclear tripwire and massive retaliation were great stupidities as well (fortunately for the world, Herman Khan came onto the scene in 1960 and put paid such nonsense).
Jack Simms..you’re comparing apples and oranges there amigo. The climate data are illustrative of a linear trend, supposedly reflective of decades of fluctuation, wheras the election results are reflective of opinion at a single point in time..no parallell there at all…whatsoever !! 🙂
Good try though!
John D.