Lord Lawson Calls On Sir Paul Nurse To Acknowledge Global Temperature Standstill

London, 27 February: In a letter to the President of the Royal Society, Lord Lawson has criticised Sir Paul Nurse for denying the reality of a global temperature standstill.Lawson was responding to a gratuitous attack by Sir Paul in a recent lecture at Melbourne University. In his speech, Sir Paul appeared to reject empirical evidence that the global warming trend of the 1980s and 1990s has come to a temporary halt since the beginning of the 21st century.In his letter, Lord Lawson writes:You claim that I "would choose two points and say ‘look, no warming’s taking place’, knowing that all the other points that you chose in the 20 years around it would not support his case”. That is a lie. I have always made clear that there was a modest degree of recorded global warming during the 20th century (see, for example, my book An Appeal to Reason, which you have clearly not taken the trouble to read).  However, so far from choosing any arbitrary ‘two points’, I was drawing attention to the fact that this warming trend appears to have ceased, since – contrary to the predictions of what you describe as “consensus scientific opinion” – there has been no further recorded global warming at all for at least the past 15 years, as even the IPCC Chairman, Dr Pachauri, has now conceded. Whatever the precise reason for this, it cannot simply be dismissed or denied.Full letter