As Its Global Warming Narrative Unravels, The IPCC Is In Damage Control Mode

As Its Global Warming Narrative Unravels, The IPCC Is In Damage Control Mode

By James Taylor, Forbes, 9/26/13


IPCC chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri is pictured next to an unidentified Arab official during a meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Struggling to keep a discredited global warming crisis afloat, United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chair Raj Pachauri this week denied the well-documented plateau in temperatures during the past 15-plus years. Pachauri’s denialism contradicted his own admission earlier this year that there has been a 17-year plateau in global temperatures.

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 statements in prior IPCC reports.

Two of the most embarrassing aspects of the Summary for Policymakers are (1) IPCC’s admission that global warming has occurred much slower than IPCC previously forecast and (2) IPCC is unable to explain the ongoing plateau in global temperatures. IPCC computer models have predicted twice as much warming as has occurred in the real world, and virtually none of the IPCC computer models can replicate or account for the recent lack of 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 in the pace of global warming.

“I don’t think there is a slowdown (in the rate of temperature increase),” Pachauri told BBC News Monday

Pachauri’s astonishing denialism not only undercuts IPCC credibility, it also 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 temperature plateau in a June 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 in a June 2013 interview. Storch said the IPCC will have 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.

A cynic may point out that presenting objective scientific evidence was never the goal of the IPCC and global warming alarmists. Instead, it can be correctly noted, the goal is to scare people into implementing the energy restrictions and wealth redistribution prescribed as a cure for the mythical global warming crisis. As prominent global warming scientist/activist Steven Schneider advised:


“We’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”

For IPCC chair Raj Pachauri, there is no balance. There is merely denialist propaganda that he hopes will blind people to the fact that global warming has, at a bare minimum, slowed down dramatically during recent years.

The problem for Pachauri and the IPCC is the IPCC’s own scientists, such as Hans von Storch, directly contradict Pachauri’s denialism. And it is not just scientists pointing out Pachaui’s denialism. Even the IPCC’s reliably sympathetic media allies are unwilling to run with Pachauri’s whopper about no recent slowdown in global warming. For example, here are a few recent headlines from some of the most alarmist-friendly media outlets in the world:

“Researching global warming’s pause,” reads a BBC News headline.

“A cooler Pacific may be behind recent pause in global warming,” reads aNational Public Radio headline.

“Why has global warming paused?” asks a Christian Science Monitor headline.

“What to make of a climate-change plateau,” reads a New York Times headline.

“Global warming has ‘paused’ because of natural causes but will continue to rise, scientists claim,” reads a UK Daily Mail headline.

To be sure, these reliably activist media outlets are not abandoning their catastrophic global warming agenda, but even they are forced to acknowledge what objective scientific evidence shows and what IPCC chair Raj Pachauri denies; global temperatures have plateaued for more than a decade and there has been, at a bare minimum, a pronounced recent slowdown in global warming.

Raj Pachauri and the IPCC are falling into the same trap that discredited Al Gore. Exaggerating the pace and impacts of global warming may provide some short-term propaganda value, but these tall tales will ultimately backfire. People are not stupid. Al Gore may have brought belief in a global warming crisis to new heights following his Hollywood movie production An Inconvenient Truth, but it took an informed public mere months to discover Al Gore and his global warming whoppers were nothing more than the latest incarnation of Joe Isuzu. Raj Pachauri and the IPCC are foolishly drag racing down the same deceptive path. One cannot watch this propaganda train wreck unfold without expectations that Pachauri will soon offer a mini-pony with every copy of the IPCC’s newest report.

IPCC chair Raj Pachauri may want us to deny objective scientific facts, but the IPCC’s own scientists, the general public and even Pachauri’s reliable media allies know better.