Last month I witnessed something shocking. Rajendra Pachauri,chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, wasgiving a talk at the University of NSW. The talk was accompanied bya slide presentation, and the most important graph showed averageglobal temperatures. For the past decade it representedtemperatures climbing sharply.
As this was shown on the screen, Pachauri told his largeaudience: "We're at a stage where warming is taking place at a muchfaster 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 pastyear, there's been a sharp cooling. These are facts, not opinion:the major sources of these figures, such as the Hadley Centre inBritain, agree on what has happened, and you can check for yourselfby going to their websites. Sure, interpretations of thesignificance of this halt in global warming vary greatly, but thefacts are clear.
So it's disturbing that Rajendra Pachauri's presentation was soerroneous, and would have misled everyone in the audience unawareof the real situation. This was particularly so because he wasgiving the talk on the occasion of receiving an honorary sciencedegree from the university.
Later that night, on ABC TV's Lateline program, Pachauriclaimed that those who disagree with his own views on globalwarming are "flat-earthers" who deny "the overwhelming weight ofscientific evidence". But what evidence could be more importantthan the temperature record, which Pachauri himself had fudged onlya few hours earlier?
In his talk, Pachauri said the number of global warming scepticsis shrinking, a curious claim he was unable to substantiate whenquestioned about it on Lateline. Still, there's no doubt amajority of climate scientists agree with the view of the IPCC.
Today I want to look at why this might be so: after all, such astate of affairs presents a challenge to sceptics such as me. Ifwe're right, then an awful lot of scientists are wrong. How couldthis be?
This question was addressed in September in a paper by ProfessorRichard Lindzen, of the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climateat Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen, probably themost qualified prominent global-warming sceptic, suggested that anumber of changes in the way science is conducted have contributedto the rise of climate alarmism among American scientists.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/...s-being-ignored/2008/11/07/1225561134617.html
As this was shown on the screen, Pachauri told his largeaudience: "We're at a stage where warming is taking place at a muchfaster 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 pastyear, there's been a sharp cooling. These are facts, not opinion:the major sources of these figures, such as the Hadley Centre inBritain, agree on what has happened, and you can check for yourselfby going to their websites. Sure, interpretations of thesignificance of this halt in global warming vary greatly, but thefacts are clear.
So it's disturbing that Rajendra Pachauri's presentation was soerroneous, and would have misled everyone in the audience unawareof the real situation. This was particularly so because he wasgiving the talk on the occasion of receiving an honorary sciencedegree from the university.
Later that night, on ABC TV's Lateline program, Pachauriclaimed that those who disagree with his own views on globalwarming are "flat-earthers" who deny "the overwhelming weight ofscientific evidence". But what evidence could be more importantthan the temperature record, which Pachauri himself had fudged onlya few hours earlier?
In his talk, Pachauri said the number of global warming scepticsis shrinking, a curious claim he was unable to substantiate whenquestioned about it on Lateline. Still, there's no doubt amajority of climate scientists agree with the view of the IPCC.
Today I want to look at why this might be so: after all, such astate of affairs presents a challenge to sceptics such as me. Ifwe're right, then an awful lot of scientists are wrong. How couldthis be?
This question was addressed in September in a paper by ProfessorRichard Lindzen, of the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climateat Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen, probably themost qualified prominent global-warming sceptic, suggested that anumber of changes in the way science is conducted have contributedto the rise of climate alarmism among American scientists.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/...s-being-ignored/2008/11/07/1225561134617.html
