Baroness Sandip Verma, a member of the House of Lords and a minister in the Department of Energy and Climate Change, said global warming has slowed because of measures taken by the government. Verma’s remarks came in response to Viscount Ridley, a Conservative peer who has questioned government efforts to slow global warming.
Ridley asked: “The fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change has confirmed in the same words that there has been a hiatus in global warming for at least the last 15 years. Would you give us the opinion of your scientific advisers as to when this hiatus is likely to end?”
Verma answered, “You raise a couple of issues that we would dispute in a longer debate, but what we do recognize is that there a change in weather patterns happening across the globe, that climate change is occurring. It may have slowed down, but that is a good thing. It could well be that some of the measures we are taking today is helping that to occur.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a creation of the U.N. in 1988, issued a report last April asserting that it was “95 per cent” certain that climate change is man-made, that sea levels have risen by seven inches since 1901, and that the sea levels would rise 10 to 32 more inches by the 22nd century.
Yet that same report conceded world temperatures have not risen noticeably in the last 15 years. That estimate was further strengthened by evidence gleaned by Ross McKitrick from the University of Guelph in Canada, who examined average land and ocean temperatures from the Hadcrut4 temperature series all the way back to 1850. Hadcrut4 is derived from mixing sea surface temperatures with land surface air temperatures. McKitrick said global warming has been at a plateau since 1990.
The IPCC is suspect; its 2007 assessment was riddled with errors, including the assertion that Himalayas glaciers would disappear by 2035.
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