Scandal over U.N. Climate Report, IPCC Chairman Grows, Yet Another Claim Debunked

Raj. K. Pachauri, Head of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Big Bucks for Bogus Climate Change Claims?

Latest U.N. Climate Report Bogus Claim Related to African Nations Demanding Billions for Global Warming Linked to Disasters

Raj. K. Pachauri, Head of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and center of growing climate change scandal

“CNN) — The glaciers in the Himalayas are receding quicker than those in other parts of the world and could disappear altogether by 2035 according to the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. The result of this deglaciation could be conflict as Himalayan glacial runoff has an essential role in the economies, agriculture and even religions of the regions countries.”
-October 5, 2009, CNN -The high stakes of melting Himalayan glaciers

Fresh on the heels of the MSM’s unwillingness to report Climategate, there’s a new global warming scandal unfolding which involves the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, its Chairman, Raj Pachauri, and the IPCC’s Nobel prize winning report on climate change. The scandal is rapidly unfolding, at least overseas, due to intrepid investigative reporting by journalists and newspapers in the U.K.. So far, U.K. reporters have uncovered two now bogus claims in the U.N. climate change report:

-Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 due to global warming, and,

-the claim that global warming has been linked to a rise in natural disasters. A claim which, during the failed Copenhagen Conference, African nations used to demand billions from the U.S. and other countries.

U. K. investigative journalists are taking a closer look at Raj. Pachauri, who, as head of the IPCC, continues to defend the report and, according to the Times Online, secured big bucks based on the U. N.’s Himalayan glacier melt claim. The Telegraph uncovered Pachauri’s to ties to carbon trading companies. Ties which have made Pachauri a wealthy man.

How is the MSM is covering the growing U.N. climate change scandal versus the U.K. press? The MSM continues to either ignore the story, or, in the case of an article published in the Washington Post, chosen to defend the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report and Pachauri stating the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035 claim was based on an “error”. The Daily Mail reported a far different scenario on how the Himalayan Glacier claim occurred, and, the reason the claim ended up in the report, an attempt to “sway world leaders”.

Excerpt from today’s Daily Mail:

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

More from the Daily Mail:

The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF.

It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source.

The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121.

Last Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’.

Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’

In fact, the 2035 melting date seems to have been plucked from thin air.

While the Daily Mail reported that the bogus claim was included in the U.N. report to “put pressure on world leaders” and that the “2035 melting date” seems to have been “plucked from thin air”, an article in today’s Washington Post in their “Science News” section stated the claim was merely an “error” which shouldn’t “derail” global warming efforts in India.

From the Washington Post:

For many Indians, the most powerful and urgent reason to battle global warming arose from a report warning that the Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035.

But that prediction was an error, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which authored the report, said Wednesday. Speaking publicly on the issue for the first time Saturday, Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the Nobel Prize-winning panel, said the mistake occurred because rigorous procedures for scientific review were not followed. He promised a more robust research system in the future.

“There will always be a body of people who will deny it till they are blue in the face,” Pachauri said. “These people are only concerned about continuing with their wasteful and terribly profligate lifestyles.”

Just who is Raj Pachauri, head of the IPCC? According to the Telegraph, that while Pachauri is often presented as a scientist, he’s a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics:

“Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.”

The Telegraph found Pachauri had engineered a fortune related to climate change:

What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.

These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.

Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’.

The Times Online discovered Pachauri secured “hundreds of thousands of pounds” for his Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, to “study” the “melting” Himalayan glaciers.

From today’s U.K.’s Times Online:

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.

“Floods, storms, drought and other climate-related natural disasters drove 20 million people from their homes last year, nearly four times as many as were displaced by conflicts, a new U.N. report said Tuesday.”
Reuters, September 22, 2009

The latest U.N. climate change report debunked claim reported by the Telegraph concerns the Copenhagen climate conference and the billions African nations demanded in compensation for global warming linked to “disasters”.

The Telegraph:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claimed in 2007 that the world had “suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather related events since the 1970s”, suggesting that part of the increase was down to global warming.

But the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim was allegedly not peer reviewed or published by the time the report was issued. When it was eventually published in 2008, it came with the caveat: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses”.

Despite the concession, the IPCC failed to clarify the statement ahead of last month’s Copenhagen summit. The claim formed a central argument at the climate change conference, where African nations demanded £62 billion in compensation from rich nations responsible for the highest amount of carbon emissions.

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Tags: Global warming, scandal, U. N.