Guest post by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Following my statement at the Doha climate conference last December that there had been no global warming for 16 years, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the railroad engineer who for some reason chairs the IPCC’s climate “science” panel, has been compelled to admit there has been no global warming for 17 years.
The Hadley Centre/CRU records show no warming for 18 years (v.3) or 19 years (v.4), and the RSS satellite dataset shows no warming for 23 years (h/t to Werner Brozek for determining these values).
Engineer Pachauri said warming would have to endure for “30 to 40 years at least” to break the long-term global warming trend. However, the world’s leading climate modelers wrote in the NOAA’s State of the Climate report in 2008 that 15 years or more without warming would indicate a discrepancy between the models and measured reality.
The Australian reports: Dr Pachauri … said that open discussion about controversial science and politically incorrect views was an essential part of tackling climate change.
“In a wide-ranging interview on topics that included this year’s record northern summer Arctic ice growth, the US shale-gas revolution, the collapse of renewable energy subsidies across Europe and the faltering European carbon market, Dr Pachauri said no issues should be off-limits for public discussion.
“In Melbourne for a 24-hour visit to deliver a lecture for Deakin University, Dr Pachauri said that people had the right to question the science, whatever their motivations.
“‘People have to question these things and science only thrives on the basis of questioning,’ Dr Pachauri said.
“He said there was ‘no doubt about it’ that it was good for controversial issues to be ‘thrashed out in the public arena’.
“Dr Pachauri’s views contrast with arguments in Australia that views outside the orthodox position of approved climate scientists should be left unreported.
“Unlike in Britain, there has been little publicity in Australia given to recent acknowledgment by peak climate-science bodies in Britain and the US of what has been a 17-year pause in global warming. Britain’s Met Office has revised down its forecast for a global temperature rise, predicting no further increase to 2017, which would extend the pause to 21 years.”
Source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nothing-off-limits-in-climate-debate/story-e6frg6n6-1226583112134
Given that the IPCC spends a great deal more thought on getting the propaganda spin right than on doing climate science, one should be healthily suspicious of what Engineer Pachauri is up to.
Inferentially, the bureaucrats have decided they can no longer pretend I was wrong to say there has been no global warming for 16 years. This one cannot be squeezed back into the bottle. So they have decided to focus on n years without warming so that, as soon as an uptick in temperature brings the period without warming to an end, they can neatly overlook the fact that what really matters is the growing, and now acutely embarrassing, discrepancy between predicted and observed long-term warming rates.
At some point – probably quite soon – an el Niño will come along, and global temperature will rise again. Therefore, it would be prudent for us to concentrate not only on the absence of warming for n years, but also on the growing discrepancy between the longer-run warming rate predicted by the IPCC and the rate that has actually occurred over the past 60 years or so.
Since 1950 the world has warmed at a rate equivalent to little more than 1 Celsius degree per century. Yet the IPCC’s central projection is for almost three times that rate over the present century. We should keep the focus on this fundamental and enduring discrepancy, which will outlast a temporary interruption of the long period without global warming that the mainstream media once went to such lengths to conceal.
What this means is that the UN’s attempt to ban me from future annual climate gabfests for telling delegates at Doha that there had been no global warming for 16 years will fail, because soon there will be no more annual climate gabfests to ban me from.
Although I have no respect for Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, I disagree with trying to belittle him by repeated use of “the railroad engineer” for the reason that “railroad engineer” has two, very different connotations. In North America, a “railroad engineer” is the person who actually drives the locomotive. In the UK, Australia, and probably some other places, such a person is an “engine driver”. Pachauri studied railroad engineering, the planning of the actual tracks, trestles, etc., quite a different person from an engine driver.
But I’ll be the first to say that railroad engineering is no particular background to head an organization related to climate…..
IanM
jeanparisot says: Are we focused too much on temperature as a signal? What if CO2 starts dropping due to this flat period without warming?
We may have to wait 800 years.
Jack Maloney says:
February 22, 2013 at 12:56 pm
“Personally, I have nothing but disdain for Dr. Pachauri and his minions. But calling him a “railroad engineer” in this headline is cheap, misleading, and an embarrassment for honest sceptics. One hopes we can do better than adopt the ad hominem tactics so common with the CAGW crowd.”
I completely agree – an appropriate description would have been failed railroad engineer – as he quit the difficult task of designing working railroads to commence on a career path for international snake oil peddler.
Stonyground says:
February 22, 2013 at 1:15 pm
“Since then there has been about a decade of cold and wet summers and colder than average winters with quite a lot of snow. My point is that, here at least, the temperature has not flatlined, but has gone down, quite significantly. If the average temperatures have been level over this period, some places must have become hotter to compensate. Over to you, the rest of the world.”
Same in germany. Our winters are more like Scottish winters than English. Very little snow in 80ies and 90ies, Techno generation showing bare bellies throughout the 90ies all year round. Now: Frozen stiff every winter. Girls huddle up in trenchcoats and leather boots. (likes that)
Ian L McQueen and Jack Maloney. I beg to respectfully differ. If people can criticise us skeptics for not having qualifications then they have no right not to expect us to criticise alarmists for having qualifications.
John Coleman says:
February 22, 2013 at 12:57 pm
John – you are spot on. What is particularly resent about the CAGW establishment is that they are now resorting to making every single weather event an opportunity to “blame global warming”. Never mind that storms, droughts, floods, and fires have happened in the past, with the same frequency and severity as today (e.g. Katrina versus Camille).
I used to really enjoy learning about and observing the weather – but now, it seems, the weather has been politicized and perverted for the sake of people with non-weather-related agendas. And I’m fearful whenever I hear some forecaster or weather “expert” on TV talking about some particular event that the next words out of their mouths will be “…and this is because our planet is getting warmer…”. Ugh.
By the way, what do you think about The Weather Channel naming storms? I think it is the most juvenile and pathetic thing I’ve seen in a long, long time.
Love the way the goalposts mysteriously move when the data do not match the model. The hockey stick theory was based on one anomaly year and comes out whenever there is a single very hot day or a king tide. Although debunked, the hockey stick “sky is falling” is what fuels all the scaremongering and idiotic legislation dictated by the UN. But who dictates to the UN? Who puts up the green inspired resolutions to hoodwink world leaders(and the ones the UN have sanctioned) to vote for? As some of us know, the Fabian Society were the chief instigators for the formation of the League of Nations and the UN. They have welcomed the infiltration of ultra green loonies in to the UN since the Fabians have ultra green intent. No mincing words-they are at least as dangerous as the Nazis, but on a worldwide scale and without a bullet fired.
Before Jack wrote that, I wrote this on Pielke, Jr.’s blog:
so I have to go on record as agreeing with what Jack Maloney said.
It must be terrible being Pachauri right now. After talking of rubbing asbestos onto sceptics faces and accusing a respected Indian glaciologist of involved in voodoo science, he now has to suffer the indignity of 17 years of lack of warming. Rest assured, the guys in the know would have explained to him what it actually means as per the models failing. His greatest fear is if the sceptics were right afterall then he might have to give his undeserved Nobel prize back.
Did I mention that Pachauri is a liar?
——-
Source:
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/11/22/pachauris-rhetoric-vs-reality/
Jack Maloney says:
February 22, 2013 at 12:56 pm
“But calling him a “railroad engineer” in this headline is cheap, misleading, and an embarrassment for honest sceptics.”
I fail to see how calling him a railroad engineer is cheap or misleading. He IS a railroad engineer. I daresay he is rather proud of that accomplishment. I suspect that when this whole IPCC boondoggle comes crashing down he’ll hope people remember him as “Pachauri the Railroad Engineer” rather than “Pachauri the Global Warming Charlatan”.
REPLY: My grandfather was a railroad engineer, he designed steam locomotives and I still have a scale sizedone he made for me when I was a tyke. He could do miracles with steam, with climate, not so much – Anthony
dp says: “M’lord, I’m having a hard time accepting that an El Niño event is a global warming event. It is simply the release of energy already here from one place to another and actually allows energy in the oceans to return to the universe. Once heat has reached the atmosphere it doesn’t linger long in the Earth system.”
dp, you’re overlooking that an El Nino also redistributes warm water within the oceans. ENSO portrays itself in the instrument temperature record as a naturally fueled recharge-discharge oscillator. For example, let’s look at the recharge and discharge associated with the 1995/96 La Niña and the 1997/98 El Niño.
1, La Niñas act as the recharge mode for tropical Pacific ocean heat content (the source of fuel for El Niños).
http://oi46.tinypic.com/sqtslz.jpg
The period highlighted in red in the above link captures the impact of the 1995/96 La Niña, which provided the fuel for the 1997/98 El Niño, and shifted up tropical Pacific ocean heat content.
2. El Niños act as the discharge mode. The 1997/98 El Niño released a monstrously large volume of naturally created warm water (see above graph) from below the surface of the west Pacific Warm Pool. That warm water sloshed briefly into the East Pacific (90S-90N, 180-80W), where it temporarily raised sea surface temperatures more than 0.5 deg C.
http://oi47.tinypic.com/24v7khg.jpg
(Note that the East Pacific hasn’t warmed in 31 years.) It then sloshed back to the West Pacific, Indian and West Pacific Oceans (90S-90N, 80W-180), and raised sea surface temperatures there 0.19 deg C.
http://oi49.tinypic.com/29le06e.jpg
And the sea surface temperatures remained at that level until the 2009/10 El Niño, which bumped sea surface temperatures up a little more.
For more info, see “The Manmade Global Warming Challenge”:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/the-manmade-global-warming-challenge/
Gary Pearse says:
February 22, 2013 at 12:09 pm
“If the foamin-at-the mouth warmers have been trimming their expectations back – even Hansen is saying, gee we included a lower sensitivity in our thinking. You guys in the middle are, perforce, becoming more wrong than the gradual revisionists who are crowding into your territory. You have provided a soft landing spot. ”
I’m not a lukewarmer but I have to defend them here – even if there would never have been a lukewarmer position the warmist internationalists of UNIPCC and UNFCCC would never have had any problems scaling back their propaganda or even reversing it to an alarmist cooling stance. The controlled media makes it possible; especially of course the public media, ABC, BBC, CBC, German ARD and ZDF, PBS.
We had the Waldsterben (Forest dying) hysteria in the late 80ies in Germany; nothing of it materialized and nobody was held accountable. Media love everyone who delivers them a scare story and will never take revenge.
Case in point, in the 70ies Stephen Schneider was an alarmist warner of the coming Ice Age (caused by CO2) and then switched to warn of impending doom through warming (caused by CO2). There is NO, absolutely NO media coverage that questions his change of mind.
And here is the definitive timeline of cooling / warming hysterias since 1880.
http://butnowyouknow.net/those-who-fail-to-learn-from-history/climate-change-timeline/
There’s a second problem with this headline.
Not only does it not elevate the debate in; in fact, make us look smaller by engaging in ad hominem ridicule, but in this case it undermines the importance and reach of this post.
“IPCC chairman acknowledges ‘No warming for 17 years’ is a big deal”
Railroad engineer, not so much.
REPLY: headline stays, be as upset as you wish. Happy to take it down though if he apologizes for “voodoo science” comments related to 2035 Himalyagate skeptics who were right. The headline is factual, he is a railroad engineer, and the headline usage was Monckton’s. – Anthony
So much for CO2 “driving” the climate. Once again it has shown itself a passive follower (see 3).
This is for all times scales;
1) The last 550 million years (Rothman, D.H., Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the last 500 million years. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99 (7): 4167-4171, (2002).
2) During the Ice ages (Monnin et al (2001). Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations over the Last Glacial Termination. Science, 291, p.112-114.)
3) And last but not least- over the last 30 years (Humluma, Stordahlc & Solheimd (2013) The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature. Global and Planetary Change: 100, 51–69)
Just how much more evidence is needed??
The ‘lukewarmer’ position is looking stronger than ever. Lukewarmers typically expect average warming of between 0.1 deg and 0.15 deg per decade. This, remember, is an average. so ‘we’ fully expect some decades to show less warming than others. The most recent decade has seen a significant fall-off in solar activity including a transition from solar max to solar min. Since we know the temperature change due to reduced TSI from max to min is roughly -0.1 deg C then it’s clear the temperature record is tying in with lukewarm projections very nicely.
I’d be more worried if I was a strong advocate for solar forcing. The much heralded global cooling has yet to materialise despite the significant decline (now at pre-1900 levels) in solar activitiy.
It’s like calling President Obama a lawyer. It’s a belittling distraction considering his current status.
There is clearly nothing wrong with being a railroad engineer, but to highlight it in such an important headline is an error. Simple courtesy is to refer to a person by their title and position. From there, one can always editorially add a clause somewhere in the article such as, “Pachauri, who was trained as a railroad engineer, …..”
If Ronald Reagan was announcing negotiations with the Russians, a headline beginning, “Once Popular B-Movie Actor Ronald Reagan.Announces …” would hardly be an appropriate way to headline an article about an important development. It would make the news reporting agency look biased, smaller.
Christopher Monckton wrote: “However, the world’s leading climate modelers wrote in the NOAA’s State of the Climate report in 2008 that 15 years or more without warming would indicate a discrepancy between the models and measured reality.”
For those wanting to confirm that, see the 2008 SOTC report here (15MB):
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf
On page 24, they write:
“The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”
And of course, Pachauri tried to move the goalposts.
Pachauri’s admission filled me with hope for a few hours…at least. However I am British. Unfortunately I have just looked at the BBC website…nothig mentioned (which is what I had expected).
However a quick glance at the Science page and there it was….a story about a massive thaw in Permafrost in the Arctic with the consequence of a a massive release of Methane and Carbon Dioxide.
All you non Brits have no idea what we have to put up with. Almost the entire scientific community, politicians and journalists are AGW crooks.
Two weeks ago week London Mayor Boris Johnson dared to suggest that sun cycles were the underlying reasons for climate change…he was heavily criticised and ridiculed.
– – – – – – – – – –
Christopher Monckton,
I think the IPCC is a science warping influence by intention and should be abandoned for the sake of re-establishing a very well balanced, transparent and open science community in the area of climate study.
What is Pachauri trying to accomplish by his statements in the The Australian?
Pachauri is doing a common simple face saving maneuver. The simplicity is genius.
It is a maneuver that will allow Pachauri (and the IPCC directorate) in the future to simply look back on what he is reported to have said in the The Australian article and then he can say honestly something like ‘The IPCC was assessing the new skeptical science research on climate once it was suitably established, which is our job’.
With that established then the IPCC can truthfully say it is current with changing scientific evidence/research. Meanwhile, with that temporary recovery of its credibility, the IPCC will be able to credibly shift to some brand new alarming world threatening claim; a new alarming claim that will become its new job to perform scientific assessments in support of it.
Watch! Be vigilant.
John
If one looks at what the Dr said literally without bias – I actually think he is quite correct. It may well take 30 years to rule out global warming as a long term trend.
Note he talks about an upward trend without talking about CO2, and indeed there has been an upward trend since 1850. Where one might take issue with him is – It is only 0.06 degrees per decade, not the IPCC’s 0.2 degrees per decade. And clearly, the link with rising CO2 is broken. The current pause is the result of a cyclic down trend, part of a 60 year oscillation, which was predicted (by others, Search WUWT for Orssengoor Akasufo) and which has an amplitude large enough to drown out the upward trend. The current pause is arguably the result of the flattening and “rolling over” of that 60 year cycle. Im guessing it will be another half cycle before we will see the up-swing of that 60 year cycle, and the global warming alarmism will begin again. Trying to see if the long term 0.06 degree warming trend is there during this cooling half of the cycle is difficult. It is probably still there.
The current trend of assuming that we are heading into an Ice Age just because the short term (60 year) cycle has turned down is just a little alarming. Can I remind everyone of the 60 year cycle of climate alarmism explicit in the old media reports. Ice Age Warming Ice Age Warming – An Ice Age scare is actually overdue.
My point is that we may be heading into an Ice Age but it may well be years before there is any REAL evidence outside of the already established swings. In the meantime the past evidence established over 130 years points to a 0.06 degree rise per decade.
Oh, I definitely never expected the headline to be removed.
But even citing this article as a fortuitous find when debating elsewhere, I was moved to point out on that site I didn’t like this headline. Other people here, fans of the WattsUpWithThat, who probably weren’t influenced by me at all (since I posted my relevant comment elsewhere) also disliked the headline. So I’m offering feedback, which dovetails with their feedback.
I think pointing out Pachauri’s lack of pertinent qualifications is fair game and maybe even makes sense in some headlines (like if the post itself was designed to mock a statement he made as ill-informed), but when he’s acknowledging truth, I don’t see how it’s helpful. Seems that “IPCC Head Says No Global Warming for Past 17 Years” is a better headline, but naturally you’ll choose your own.
“At some point – probably quite soon – an el Niño will come along, and global temperature will rise again”.
What is missing is the warming trend which was apparent last century. A couple of years of warmer temperatures wouldn’t cut it. Nor would a La Nina cooler period. With every year that goes by, it becomes ever harder for any one-off event to change a 17+-year trend from neutral to positive.
james griffin says:
February 22, 2013 at 2:23 pm
“All you non Brits have no idea what we have to put up with. Almost the entire scientific community, politicians and journalists are AGW crooks.”
I’m German, I can relate. We have not one BBC but two (ARD and ZDF) and we fund them with 6 bn EUR a year. I tried to find comparisons of how much per capita countries fund their public boradcasting tyrants but nothing’s on the web. But from the numbers I gathered Germany is simply off the scale propaganda-wise.
John Finn says:
“The ‘lukewarmer’ position is looking stronger than ever.”
You are dreaming, John. Every warmist prediction has turned out to be flat wrong. And CO2 is completely harmless at current and projected concentrations.
Not a week goes by without another major deconstruction of the warmist belief system. It would be hard to find anywhere in science where one group has been so completely, totally wrong.
Money — more that $100 BILLION since 2000 in federal grants, plus a huge amount from NGOs — is the only thing that keeps climate alarmists from being laughed off the world stage.
pachauri’s admission is not the headline showing up on google australia news page. rather it is this headline from taxpayer-funded ABC which says nothing about the Met Office revelations:
21 Feb: ABC World Today: Head of IPCC says most vulnerable countries have already reached ‘tipping point’
SIMON LAUDER: You’ve said before that carbon dioxide needs to be no higher than 350 parts per million to avoid the climate tipping point. Do you think action is happening fast enough to avoid that still?
RAJENDRA PACHAURI: Well, I did preface that remark by saying this is a personal view and I’m not saying that as chairman of the IPCC because the IPCC is not supposed to be politically prescriptive. I mean it is for the world to decide whether they want 350 parts per million or 450 or whatever but as a human being, as an individual I would say that I would feel comfortable with that level and of course, we know that is going to be quite a challenge…
RAJENDRA PACHAURI: You know, it’s really a question of defining what the tipping point is for whom. Parts of the world where if you were to drop people over there, they would tell you that they are probably at the tipping point already or they might even have crossed it…
(re IPCC Fifth Assessment):
RAJENDRA PACHAURI: Well, I expect it will be an advancement in terms of knowledge based on published material that has been produced since 2007, since we brought out the last report. There will be a few new features. We’re looking at a whole range of topics in much greater depth this time and hopefully we’ll be able to fill some of the gaps.
Most importantly there’ll be, in my view, much greater regional detail this time so people would know what the impacts of climate change would be in specific locations throughout the world and I think this would help create understanding on what needs to be done…
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2013/s3695289.htm