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Rajendra Pachauri under pressure to step down
UN climate change chairman ‘should have apologised for glacier gaffe sooner’
Pressure was growing last night on the Indian scientist Dr Rajendra Pachauri to step down as chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change before the public lose all confidence in the body.
This follows Pachauri's failure to act over a serious error in the IPCC's 2007 report - namely, that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. This turned to be rubbish. As The First Post reported last month, the claim was never peer-reviewed and has been traced back to an unsubstantiated 1999 report in the popular science magazine New Scientist.
It now transpires that a journalist working for Science had told Dr Pachauri several times in late 2009 that glaciologists were refuting the glacier claim. But Pachauri refused to do anything about it, saying: "I don't have anything to add on glaciers" and suggesting that the error would be corrected when the IPCC next reported in 2013/14.
The pressure on Pachauri to step down comes from John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK. Sauven says Pachauri should have acted as soon as he was informed of the error, even if this would have embarrassed the IPCC in the build-up to December's climate change summit in Copenhagen.
In the end, the IPCC was forced to issue a correction and apology on January 20, only after the error had made headlines around the world and given huge encouragement to climate change sceptics.
Sauven said: "Mistakes will always be made but it's how you handle those mistakes which affects the credibility of the institution. Pachauri should have put his hand up and said 'we made a mistake'. It's in these situations that your character and judgment is tested. Do you make the right judgment call? He clearly didn't."
He called for a new chairman to try to restore public confidence by introducing more rigorous procedures. "The IPCC needs to regain credibility," said Sauven. "Is that going to happen with Pachauri? I don't think so." ·
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Oh yes, first Global Cooling, then Global Warming, now Al Gore's Climate Change, just in case things don't go the way he planned. What a guy ! He's the scam artist supreme, and all the politicians are falling for it.
The IPCC is a laugh a minute. Here is another stupid error in IPCC AR4: check it out here at their official website, which has the text of the printed report http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/ch12s12-2-3.html It states "The Netherlands is an example of a country highly susceptible to both sea-level rise and river flooding because 55% of its territory is below sea level where 60% of its population lives and 65% of its Gross National Product (GNP) is produced."
Yea, right! The real figure for Netherlands territory below sea level is 26%, so AR4 has it more than double. Any schoolkid could have checked that from an encyclopedia. What are they going to say about that? They made themselves look ridiculous yesterday in rebutting the fact that the report is FULL of falsehoods.
michael jose; I am glad you posted. I remember the 'Global Cooling' scares of the 1970s. We were 'due' for a new Ice Age.
This whole climate scare thing is some sort of smokescreen...I don't even listen to any of it any more. It is all crap
This man's flippancy with the truth has been under investigation for months at EUReferendum, Wattsupwiththat, Bishop Hill et al...and Delingpole & Booker in their columns............But the MSM are only now beginning to mention the scam, why?.........Because this is as much political as environmental & literally trillions of Euros are at stake in the biggest scam of the lot: Carbon trading is making fortunes for those involved & no prizes for guessing who pays....................the Public has been thoroughly fooled into believing that CO2 is a pollutant ( you couldn't make it up) No CO2 would mean no plantlife...and thus no us.....and yes, I remember the early 70s when we were all going to freeze to death in the new Ice Age
Michael - you can check it out in more detail here: http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/un-ipcc-rotting-from-the-hea... By the way, the IPCC has made itself look ridiculous again yesterday, trying to bat away the very real problems identified in its report: "The leadership of the IPCC has...concluded that the challenges are without foundations...We are convinced that there has been no error on those issues on the part of the IPCC...the IPCC has valid reasons for publishing the text as it stands in the report."
What a pack of jokers! "The leadership" is, of course, Pachauri, whom we now know was paying scant attention as he was writing a porn novel, and IPCC have "valid reasons" for wording the report as they did so that it can spread lies.
Well, thanks to Kevin, for that. I now feel fully apprised of all the relevant information to be able to levy my judgement on Mr Patchauri - he should resign like a man of any remaining honour, or be forced out if he has no shame left. Dishonest science, corrupted by corrupt politicians, must be punished. We can vote against democratically elected leaders, but scientists who are not disciplined by their peers must suffer more mundane treatments.
Even when everyone knew the 2035 date was a lie, Pachauri and his organization TERI kept lying about it to make sure they got their hands on grant money. For those of us who live in the EU, that's millions of our taxes.
As far as the IPCC is concerned, it wasn't simply that the 2035 date was unsubstantiated, the fact is that Syed Hasnain's 2035 date (as reported by Fred Pearce in New Scientist in 1999, and The Times from Hasnain's comments at a conference in Birmingham in 2003) were comprehensively DEBUNKED by Jack Ives, one of the foremost experts on the Himalayas, and serving the UN, in his book in 2004, and in the peer-reviewed Himalayan Journal of Sciences in 2005. So for several years before IPCC's AR4 was published it was well known that the 2035 date was a lie. Pachauri has shown himself to be a complete liar.
QUOTE: "the claim was never peer-reviewed and has been traced back to an unsubstantiated 1999 report in the popular science magazine New Scientist". Well, the truth will out. I remember starting to read the New Scientist weekly magazine the mid-1970s, when every week it ran a doom-and-gloom series on the threat of a new ice age from the global cooling trend. That indeed was after industrial CO2 production had been belching out all over the world for thirty years since the mid-1940s! No sign of anthropogenic greenhouse gases there then. Or manmade global warming either. But of course it warmed up, so then the scareology turned to 'global warming'. I remember an Horizon program noting the switch and sandbagging an American scientist in his office with the line 'in the 1970s you supported global cooling, and now you support global warming - is it the case that you just jump on whatever bandwagon is rolling for the grant money?' The poor fellow just opened his mouth, but no words came out. On camera too - so busted. Why someone cannot similarly get the IPCC I don't know - unless being accused by world expert malaria epidemiologist Paul Reiter of being politically biased and scientifically mendacious in the film 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' counts - and Prof Reiter is cited as one of their contributing scientists in the 'consensus'!! And for good measure, British Prof of Biogeography Peter Stott takes the IPCC to task for being 'a political body', not a scientific body, explaining the Medieval Warm Period (circa AD1000) as warmer than today and a period associated with agricultural advances and 'great riches'. This was when Britain exported wine to France in such quantities that they raised import tariffs to keep it out! So what is the IPCC political agenda? Global government instituted by stealth, funded by a global carbon taxes. They want us all to be equally badly off, like typical socialists the world over.