Struggling to keep a discredited global warming crisis afloat, United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chair Raj Pachauri yesterday denied the well-documented pause in global warming during the past 15-plus years. Pachauri’s denialism contradicted his own admission earlier this year that there has been a 17-year pause in global warming.
The IPCC is in full damage-control mode after it leaked advance copies of an upcoming Summary for Policymakers to what it assumed would be friendly journalists. The journalists, however, quickly realized the IPCC Summary for Policymakers contained several embarrassing walk-backs from alarmist assertions in prior IPCC reports.
Two of the most embarrassing components of the Summary for Policymakers are IPCC’s admission that global warming has occurred much slower than IPCC previously forecast and that IPCC is unable to explain the ongoing pause in global warming. IPCC computer models previously predicted approximately double the warming that has occurred in the real world, and virtually none of the IPCC computer models can replicate or account for the current longstanding pause in global warming.
Rather than acknowledge that perhaps IPCC overshot its predictions in past reports, Pachauri doubled down on denialism, claiming there has been no slowdown at all in the pace of global warming.
“I don’t think there is a slowdown (in the rate of temperature increase),” Pachauri told BBC News yesterday.
Pachauri’s astonishing denialism not only undercuts IPCC’s credibility, it contradicts his own words earlier this year in an interview with the Australian.
“The UN’s climate change chief, Rajendra Pachauri, has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises,” the Australian‘s Graham Lloyd reported in February after interviewing Pachauri.
While Pachauri and the IPCC bureaucracy double down on denial, some IPCC scientists are acknowledging the scientific truth. IPCC Lead Author Hans von Storch, a climate scientist and professor at the Meteorological Institute at the University of Hamburg, acknowledged the ongoing pause in a June 2013 interview with der Spiegel.
“So far, no one has been able to provide a compelling answer to why climate change seems to be taking a break,” IPCC Lead Author Hans von Storch told der Spiegel.
Storch said the IPCC will have to tone down its climate models unless warming quickly and rapidly accelerates.
“According to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 10 years. That hasn’t happened. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) — a value very close to zero,” Storch told der Spiegel. “This is a serious scientific problem that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will have to confront when it presents its next Assessment Report late next year.”
“At my institute, we analyzed how often such a 15-year stagnation in global warming occurred in the simulations. The answer was: in under 2 percent of all the times we ran the simulation. In other words, over 98 percent of forecasts show CO2 emissions as high as we have had in recent years leading to more of a temperature increase,” Storch explained.
