In 2010, IPCC chief Rachendra Pachauri refused to acknowledge that global temperatures had not risen for over a decade when CFACT interviewed him at the UN’s COP 16 in Cancun, Mexico.

This week Pachauri caved and conceded 17 years without warming at a speech at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.

Pachauri is the IPCC’s highest climate official, but is not, by the way, a climate scientist.  Rather (as Lord Monckton loves to point out), he is a railroad engineer.  Remember this the next time you encounter a warming activist (who is also not a climate scientist) who insists that you may not evaluate global warming policy because you are not a climate scientist.  Global warming advocacy is a world of double standards and double speak.

If the head of the IPCC is ready to acknowledge that Met Office and NOAA data show no warming for 17 years, he should also acknowledge that their data shows no more than three quarters of a degree Celsius of warming altogether.  That’s it, three quarters of a degree and it is highly debatable how much of that three quarters, if any, is man-made rather than natural and solar.

Once Pachauri admits that warming has been minimal, and less than climate models predict, he should admit that this three quarters of a degree cannot have caused hurricanes Sandy or Katrina, droughts, fires, floods, decreased truffle yields, or erosion in the Maldives.  Al Gore, John Kerry and President Obama should then admit the same.  They should also admit that we should not expect this three quarters of a degree to cause frogs, locusts, boils, pestilence, the Nile to bleed, or burning hail.

The longer we wait, the more we expect observational reality to continue to intrude on hysterical global warming claims.   We cannot afford to allow policy makers to lock in $trillions in waste and inefficiency while we wait for observational reality to debunk the climate scare. We need to wake up now and tell them to stop.  We should, as CFACT’s Craig Rucker recently reminded us in the National Journal, “find the courage to do nothing.”