Michael Duffy writes of surprise in the 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.
Honorary Degrees in the hard sciences should be illegal. Even the freaks at Nobel knew they could only get away with giving The Goracle their trinket for his junk science if it was the abstract “Peace” award. The scientific community would have whipped out the torches and pitchforks if they tried to juice him with an actual science prize.
Hell, it’s too bad they didn’t though. It might have been the end of the Global Warming Death Cult if they had.
Found via Counting Cats in Zanzibar
“Honorary Degrees in the hard sciences should be illegal.”
I agree! While there are occasionally very talented people who are self-taught in the hard sciences, most Universities think long and hard about the content of their programs and consider not just scientific theory and practice, but also require course which require a scientist/engineer to engage and argue. A person who is self taught is likely to have missed out on the experience of arguing against peers in an open forum and may not have learned how to discern the logical from the logical sounding.