TOOTSIFs Lie

Members of "The Order of The Sky Is Falling (the Hon. Al Gore, founder)" repeatedly insist that there's a consensus supporting human-caused warming. They say climate change skeptics are either in denial or in the pocket of oil companies--and so try to suppress them. TOOTSIFs hope few remember the discredited "hockey stick" graph, the product of apparent fraud and clear cover-up. And I constantly remind greenies about Senator Timothy Wirth, later Undersecretary of State in the Clinton Administration, who said:

We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing - in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.

So I should be inured to progressives pushing climate change as a proxy for collectivism and income redistribution--and hiding it under the heading "sustainable capitalism."

Still, I was surprised by Michael Duffy's account of how "Truly inconvenient truths about climate change being ignored", in the November 8th Sydney Morning Herald:

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.

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.

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?

Pachauri and the IPCC have graduated from nonsense to flat-out falsehoods. Neither is science.

(via Planet Gore)