New Fraser Institute report looks to cool climate change debate
Posted Oct 2, 2014 7:26 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Earth’s temperature hasn’t changed significantly since the late 1990’s, according to a new report from the Fraser Institute.
The authors say the results come despite an 11 per cent increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas levels since 1995, driven primarily by carbon dioxide emissions from cars, power plants and other man-made sources.
The Institute’s Ross McKitrick argued government policy needs to match the data.
“Along the way people just lost track of the fact that you need to keep checking your model against the data,” he said. “That’s starting to happen but my paper is arguing we are not doing that quickly enough.”
He said policymakers risk overestimating the harmful effects of CO2, and as a result, may set inappropriate policy targets.
“Part of the thing that will come out of a study like this is just getting people talking about the fact that the picture has actually changed here,” he said. “There is this pause in global warming and we need to think through what that means.”
Despite this report, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told a different story.
Chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri told the climate change summit in New York that each of the last three decades has been “successively warmer at the earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850.”
