Raj Pachuri

By Matt Patterson

If this keeps up, no one’s going to trust any scientists.

The global-warming establishment took a body blow this week, as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change received a stunning rebuke from a top-notch independent investigation.

For two decades, the IPCC has spearheaded efforts to convince the world’s governments that man-made carbon emissions pose a threat to the global temperature equilibrium — and to civilization itself. IPCC reports, collated from the work of hundreds of climate scientists and bureaucrats, are widely cited as evidence for the urgent need for drastic action to “save the planet.”

But the prestigious InterAcademy Council, an independent association of “the best scientists and engineers worldwide” (as the group’s own Web site puts it) formed in 2000 to give “high-quality advice to international bodies,” has finished a thorough review of IPCC practices — and found them badly wanting.

Read the rest of this story at the New York Post.

This is a translation of an article in the Norwegian newspaper Forskning.

By Bjornar Kjensli

A German climate researcher says that people are beginning to lose faith in climate research, pointing to the IPPC as one of the main causes. Norwegian IPCC veterans disagree about what the organization should do about it.

After a winter of setbacks and disclosure of mistakes, many different ideas have been put forward about what can be done about the IPPC and these ideas abound in newspapers and in journals such as Nature and Science. One of the most vociferous critics has been Hans von Storch. He is a professor of meteorology at the University of Hamburg, director of the Institute for Coastal Research at GKSS in Geestacht and was the main author of the chapter on regional climate in Working Group 1 (WG1) of the Third IPCC Assessment Report (AR3), which was published in 2001.

On 22 April 2010 he was in Oslo, where he addressed the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in a lecture containing a number of objections to the IPCCs current way of working. The presentation of the lecture, you can see here.[link]

Not skeptic but a critic

Von Storch has long been critical of the way the IPCC has dealt with scientific uncertainty, and was himself described in less than flattering terms in some of the disputed emails released from the CRU at the University of East Anglia last November.

The man behind the hockey stick curve, Professor Michael Mann wrote, among other things, in an email to Phil Jones, the head of the University of East Anglia Climate Centre, that “Von Storch is a strange guy”, and that it would not surprise him if he was really a climate skeptic. Von Storch says he has nothing against being a strange guy, but he is not in any doubt that anthropogenic emissions are leading to climate change. He is however very critical of the internal processes of the IPCC and the role of chairman, Rajendra Pachauri.

Read the rest at Bishop Hill.

Rajendra Pachauri, the Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will defend his handling of a crisis that has shaken the world’s faith in his organisation at a meeting of environmental leaders in Bali.

By Geoffrey Lean

He will try to save his job and shore up support for the IPCC in the wake of the discovery of errors in its latest report.

He is attending a special closed meeting of environment and climate ministers in the fringes of the annual assembly of the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Governing Council, the biggest such event since Copenhagen climate summit that ended in confusion and recriminations last December.

The governments are publicly backing Dr Pachauri, who they re-elected unopposed less than 18 months ago – the EU said last night that he had “done a good job, in general” and “deserves full confidence”.  However privately, officials have expressed a wish that he will decide to step down before long.

The IPCC was engulfed in crisis when it emerged that it had relied on unsubstantiated reports from environmental groups to make a headline-grabbing prediction that the glaciers of the Himalayas would disappear by 2035.

Dr Pachauri’s robust response to counterclaims that that the glaciers were not melting so rapidly – which he dismissed as “voodoo science” – only increased pressure on his position.

Read the rest of this article at the Telegraph.

Climate scientists who play fast and loose with the facts are imperiling not just their profession but the planet

By Fred Guterl

One of the most impressive visuals in Al Gore’s now famous slide show on global warming is a graph known as the “hockey stick.” It shows temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rising slowly for most of the last thousand years and turning steeply upward in the last half of the 20th century. As evidence of the alarming rate of global warming, it tells a simple and compelling story. That’s one reason the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change included the graph in the summary of its 2001 report. But is it true?

The question occurred to Steven McIntyre when he opened his newspaper one morning in 2002 and there it was—the hockey stick. It was published with an article on the debate over whether Canada should ratify the Kyoto agreement to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. McIntyre had little knowledge of the intricate science of climate change; he didn’t even have a Ph.D. He did have a passion for numbers, however. He also had some experience in the minerals business, where, he says, people tend to use hockey-stick graphs when they are trying to pull one over on you. “Reality usually isn’t so tidy.”

As every climate scientist must know by now, McIntyre’s skepticism of the hockey stick launched him on a midlife career change: he has become the granddaddy of the global warming “denial” movement. McIntyre asserted that the data of Michael Mann, head of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center, did not support his conclusions, and that a true graph of temperatures would suggest a cyclical cause of recent warming. Following in his footsteps, a cottage industry of amateur climatologists have dug into the climate literature, tried to poke holes in the arguments, and demanded supporting data from scientists, sometimes under the auspices of Freedom of Information Act requests.

The scientists have resisted these efforts just as fiercely. For the past six years the conflict has played out in blogs, in the halls of Congress, and in deliberations of the IPCC. It came to a crescendo with the theft of private e-mails from the University of East Anglia in England in November, which raised questions about the scientific objectivity of several prominent researchers, including Phil Jones, who resigned in December as head of the Climatic Research Unit.

The battle between “alarmists” and “deniers” has taken a huge toll, not just on the reputations of Jones and the other “climategate” scientists. It has also damaged the credibility of climate science itself, and threatened more than a decade of diplomatic efforts to engineer a global reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions. The effort, which has kept a forward momentum since the Kyoto meeting in 1997, came to a cold stop in Copenhagen in December. The conference was originally intended to bring the U.S. and China into a global agreement, but produced nothing of substance. Indeed, the climate project bears a striking resemblance to health-care reform in the United States—stalled by a combination of political resistance and hubris.

What went wrong? Part of the blame lies, of course, with those who obstructed the efforts of the IPCC and the individual scientists, including bloggers who tried to sandbag scientists with spurious FOIA requests, and the perpetrators (as yet unknown) of the hack at the Climatic Research Unit. Part of the blame also falls on the climate scientists themselves. Many of them—including perhaps Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC head—may have stepped too far over the line from science to advocacy, undermining their own credibility. Some scientists, as a result, are now calling for a change in tone from antagonism to reconciliation. Climate science, they say, needs to open its books and be more tolerant of scrutiny from the outside. Its institutions—notably the IPCC—need to go about their business with greater transparency. “The circle-the-wagons mentality has backfired,” says Judith Curry, head of Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

The first thing to fix is the institution that has borne the brunt of the recent public-relations disaster: the IPCC itself. Recently there have been several minor revelations of sloppiness. A line in the group’s 2007 report stating that glaciers in the Himalayas will melt entirely by 2035 turns out to have come not from the peer-reviewed literature, but from a 1999 article in New Scientist, a popular magazine in the U.K. More damaging, IPCC chairman Pachauri has been acting as a consultant to financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank and Pegasus, an investment firm. Although he says he has donated the proceeds to the nonprofit organization he founded in Delhi to promote charitable programs in sustainability, many people have wondered whether the head of a scientific organization that calls itself “policy neutral” should be consulting with banks. Some have called for his resignation.

Read the rest of this story at Newsweek.

The Indian government has established its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group headed by its own leading scientist Dr R.K Pachauri.

By Dean Nelson

The move is a significant snub to both the IPCC and Dr Pachauri as he battles to defend his reputation following the revelation that his most recent climate change report included false claims that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. Scientists believe it could take more than 300 years for the glaciers to disappear.

The body and its chairman have faced growing criticism ever since as questions have been raised on the credibility of their work and the rigour with which climate change claims are assessed.

In India the false claims have heightened tensions between Dr Pachauri and the government, which had earlier questioned his glacial melting claims. In Autumn, its environment minister Mr Jairam Ramesh said while glacial melting in the Himalayas was a real concern, there was evidence that some were actually advancing despite global warming.

Dr Pachauri had dismissed challenges like these as based on “voodoo science”, but last night Mr Ramesh effectively marginalized the IPC chairman even further.

He announced the Indian government will established a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world’s ‘third ice cap’, and an ‘Indian IPCC’ to use ‘climate science’ to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.

“There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn’t do the original research which is one of the weaknesses… they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.

Read the rest of this story at the Telegraph.

By Ben Webster

The head of the UN’s climate change body is under pressure to resign after one of his strongest allies in the environmental movement said his judgment was flawed and called for a new leader to restore confidence in climatic science.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has insisted that he will remain in post for another four years despite having failed to act on a serious error in the body’s 2007 report.

John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK , said that Dr Pachauri should have acted as soon as he had been informed of the error, even though issuing a correction would have embarrassed the IPCC on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit.

A journalist working for Science had told Dr Pachauri several times late last year that glaciologists had refuted the IPCC claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Dr Pachauri refused to address the problem, saying: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.” He suggested that the error would not be corrected until 2013 or 2014, when the IPCC next reported.

The IPCC issued a correction and apology on January 20, three days after the error had made global headlines. Mr 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.”

Read the rest of this story at the London Times.

Earth Heating Up

By Ninad D. Sheth

It was presented as fact. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, led by India’s very own RK Pachauri, even announced a consensus on it. The world was heating up and humans were to blame. A pack of lies, it turns out.

The climate change fraud that is now unravelling is unprecedented in its deceit, unmatched in scope—and for the liberal elite, akin to 9 on the Richter scale. Never have so few fooled so many for so long, ever.

The entire world was being asked to change the way it lives on the basis of pure hyperbole. Propriety, probity and transparency were routinely sacrificed.

The truth is: the world is not heating up in any significant way. Neither are the Himalayan glaciers going to melt as claimed by 2035. Nor is there any link at all between natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and global warming. All that was pure nonsense, or if you like, ‘no-science’!

The climate change mafia, led by Dr Rajendra K Pachauri, chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), almost pulled off the heist of the century through fraudulent data and suppression of procedure. All the while, they were cornering millions of dollars in research grants that heaped one convenient untruth upon another. And as if the money wasn’t enough, the Nobel Committee decided they should have the coveted Peace Prize.

But let’s begin at the beginning. Mr Pachauri has no training whatsoever in climate science. This was known all the time, yet he heads the pontification panel which proliferates the new gospel of a hotter world. How come? Why did the United Nations not choose someone who was competent? After all, this man is presumably incapable of differentiating between ocean sediments and coral terrestrial deposits, nor can he go about analysing tree ring records and so on. That’s not jargon; these are essential elements of a syllabus in any basic course on climatology.

You cannot blame him. His degree and training is in railroad engineering. You read it right. This man was educated to make railroads from point A to point B.

THE GATHERING STORM

There are many casualties in this sad story of greed and hubris. The big victim is the scientific method. This was pointed out in great detail by John P Costella of the Virginia-based Science and Public Policy Institute. Science is based on three fundamental pillars. The first is fallibility. The fact that you can be wrong, and if so proven by experimental input, any hypothesis can be—indeed, must be—corrected.

This was systematically stymied as early as 2004 by the scientific in-charge of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Change Unit. This university was at the epicentre of the ‘research’ on global warming. It is here that Professor Phil Jones kept inconvenient details that contradicted climate change claims out of reports.

The second pillar of science is that by its very nature, science is impersonal. There is no ‘us’, there is no ‘them’. There is only the quest. However, in the entire murky non-scientific global warming episode, if anyone was a sceptic he was labelled as one of ‘them’. At the very apex, before his humiliating retraction, Pachauri had dismissed a report by Indian scientists on glaciers as “voodoo science”.

The third pillar of science is peer group assessment. This allows for validation of your thesis by fellow scientists and is usually done in confidence. However, the entire process was set aside by the IPCC while preparing the report. Thus, it has zero scientific value.

The fact that there was dissent within the climate science teams, that some people objected to the very basis of the grand claims of global warming, did not come out through the due process. It came to light when emails at the Climate Research Centre at East Anglia were hacked in November 2009. It is from the hacked conversations that a pattern of conspiracy and deceit emerge. It is a peek into the world of global warming scaremongering—amplify the impact of CO2, stick to dramatic timelines on destruction of forests, and never ask for a referral or raise a contrary point. You were either a believer in a hotter world or not welcome in this ‘scientific fold’.

HOUSE OF CARDS AND COLOUR OF CASH

So we have the fact that a non-expert heads the IPCC. We have the fact that glaciers are not melting by 2035; this major scaremongering is now being defended as a minor error (it was originally meant to be 2350, some have clarified). The date was spouted first by Syed Hasnain, an Indian glacier expert, in an interview to a magazine. It had no scientific validity, and, as Hasnain has himself said, was speculative.

On the basis of that assertion, The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri) that Pachauri heads and where Hasnain works in the glaciology team, got two massive chunks of funding. The first was estimated to be a $300,000 grant from Carnegie Corporation and the second was a part of the $2 million funding from the European Union. So you write a report that is false on glaciers melting and get millions to study the impact of a meltdown which will not be happening in the first place. Now if this is not a neat one, what is?

Read the rest of this article at Open.

Confidence Melting Away: Doubts Grow in Climate Change Debate

By Gerald Traufetter

The Siachen Glacier is home to the world’s highest crisis region. Here, at 6,000 meters (19,680 feet) above sea level, Indian and Pakistani soldiers face off, ensconced in heavily armed positions.

The ongoing border dispute between the two nuclear powers has already claimed the lives of 4,000 men — most of them having died of exposure to the cold.

Now the Himalayan glacier is also at the center of a scientific dispute. In its current report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that the glacier, which is 71 kilometers (44 miles) long, could disappear by 2035. It also predicts that the other 45,000 glaciers in the world’s highest mountain range will be virtually gone by then, with drastic consequences for billions of people in Asia, whose life depends on water that originates in the Himalayas. The IPCC report led environmental activists to sound the alarm about a drama that could be unfolding at the “world’s third pole.”

“This prognosis is, of course, complete nonsense,” says John Shroder, a geologist and expert on glaciers at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. The results of his research tell a completely different story.
For the past three decades, the US glaciologist has been traversing the majestic mountains of the Himalayan region, particularly the Karakorum Range, with his measuring instruments. The discoveries he has made along the way are not consistent with the assessment long held by the IPCC. “While many glaciers are shrinking, others are stable and some are even growing,” says Shroder.

Untenable Claim

The gaffe over the Himalayan glaciers has triggered an outcry in the world of climatology. Some are already using the word “Glaciergate” in reference to the scandal over a scientifically untenable claim in the fourth IPCC assessment report, which the UN climate body publishes every five years. The fourth assessment report was originally published in 2007. Last week, the IPCC withdrew the erroneous claim and apologized for the error.

German Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen, a member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), is also upset about the incident. “The error in the IPCC report is serious and should not have happened,” Röttgen told SPIEGEL. “Scientific accuracy is a vital condition to support the credibility of the political conclusions we draw as a result.” Although the minister still has confidence in the overall validity of the IPCC report, he wants to see “a thorough investigation into how the error originated and was communicated.”

But why wasn’t this clearly nonsensical claim noticed long ago by at least one of the 3,000 scientists who contributed to the IPCC report? “What’s really amazing is that such a blunder remained uncorrected for so long,” says Shroder.

Read the rest of this story at ABC News (Yes. Really. ABC News).

Investors Business Daily Editorial

Global Warming: If we’re serious about restoring science to its rightful place, the head of the U.N.’s panel on climate change should step down. Evidence shows he quarterbacked a deliberate and premeditated fraud.The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been forced to back off its now-discredited claim that the Himalayan glaciers would soon disappear. But it’s not true, the panel’s vice chairman, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, told the BBC, that it was simply a “human mistake.”

The panel’s chairman, Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, who was forced to admit the claim had no basis in observable scientific fact, said its inclusion was merely a “poor application” of IPCC procedures, acting as if the original source of the claim, Indian scientist Dr. Syed Hasnain, was a total stranger.

In fact, as Christopher Booker of the London Telegraph points out, Dr. Hasnain “has for the past two years been working as a senior employee of the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the Delhi-based company of which Dr. Pachauri was director-general.”

So after the 2007 assessment that included Hasnain’s claim, Pachauri was impressed enough to hire him as an employee. Pachauri should have been familiar with both his work and the fact the claim had not been peer-reviewed, and aware that it had been challenged by reputable geologists.

Read the rest of this piece at Investors Business Daily.

By Jonathan Leake

The chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Rajendra Pachauri’s Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion’s share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers.

It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus. The revelation comes just a week after The Sunday Times highlighted serious scientific flaws in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on the likely impacts of global warming.

The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 – an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report.
Since then, however, The Sunday Times has discovered that the same bogus claim has been cited in grant applications for TERI.

One of them, announced earlier this month just before the scandal broke, resulted in a £310,000 grant from Carnegie.

Read the rest of this story at the Sunday Times.