UPDATE: links to new information posted at the bottom of this article, including a new story from the Times
UPDATE2: Jonathan Leake’s story at the Time is Online, linking Pauchari’s TERI organization to government funding grants that were solicited using the bogus “Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035” claim.
Christopher Booker of the Telegraph has a story that shows Pachauri’s own employee at TERI was the source of the bogus glacier claim. Now the corruption comes full circle.
UPDATE3: Pachauri now bizarrely claims in a press interview that the IPCC’s credibility has been strengthened.
IMHO, Dr. Pachauri is toast. He has nowhere to go except out.
See links at end of this story
We’ve covered some of the travails of IPCC Chairman Dr. Rajenda Pachauri here at WUWT in the past couple of weeks. Besides the facts mentioned above, the National Hurricane Center chief scientist Christopher Landsea resigned in 2007 from the IPCC over what he cited as lack of confidence in the science.
I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound.
Most notable recently was the bogus claim In the IPCC AR4 that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 that appeared to be based on nothing more than a journalist’s opinion piece, contrary to IPCC rules that reports be based on peer reviewed science. The Times of India has just run their first political cartoon on the subject.
That in itself was a bombshell, since the IPCC had to withdraw the claim. Other errors in the report have been found also and it is looking like the IPCC didn’t do any checking of this section of their report, bringing the entire report into question.
There’s also been quite a bit of first class investigative work done by Christopher Booker of the Telegraph and Dr. Richard North of the EU Referendum about Dr. Pachauri’s connections to TERI (The Energy Research Institute) and his IPCC position. As I pointed out about his email usage, it seems he has a difficult time delineating the two to ensure that there is no conflict of interest.
Now it appears that conflict of interest charges are about to go to a higher level.
The “IPCC 2035 glacier error” has been used to solicit funds for new projects, and guess where the money goes?
This PDF File is from the EU’s HighNoon website, and shows how the EU set up a project to research the ‘rapid retreat’ of glaciers in the Himalayas based on the bogus IPCC report. Some of the EU taxpayers’ money put into this project has gone to TERI, which is run by Dr. Rajendra Pachauri.
See slide number 5 for the IPCC citation.
It appears that is using this single “…disappearing by the year 2035” statement as justification for an entire research project, funded by the EU, which is funded by taxpayers.
As we see in slide 7, they got a nice tidy 10 million Euros ($14.13 millon USD) to study a false statement based on nothing more than a passing opinion.
I have word through a backchannel that Jonathan Leake of the London Times is about to make known financial linkages to this and several more TERI/IPCC projects funded by taxpayer dollars.
Here’s his Times report from last week.
I’ll make his newest report available here as soon as it appears.
UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters
Jonathan Leake, Science and Environment Editor
BREAKING NEWS:
Leake: UN climate panel blunders again over Himalayan glaciers
Taxpayers funding research under Pachauri’s TERI organization
Booker: Pachauri: the real story behind the Glaciergate scandal :
Dr Pachauri has rapidly distanced himself from the IPCC’s baseless claim about vanishing glaciers. But the scientist who made the claim now works for Pachauri, writes Christopher Booker
Bizarre claim: ‘IPCC’s credibility has increased’: Pachauri
“Facing a barrage of questions from the media about his `loss of credibility’, Pachauri maintained that all “rational people” would continue to repose their faith in IPCC and its findings.” – yeah right.
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Re: Nobel Peace Prizes vs. Scientific Prizes
In my opinion, it does not matter whether or not there two committees are awarding different Nobel prizes. The prestige comes from the well-known and well-regarded Nobel name. If one committee drags the name in mud, the entire organization and its reputation will surfer as a result. Maybe it’s time that the scientific Nobel committee distances itself from the political Nobel committee by refusing to allow the Nobel name to be associated with the political prize.
TerryBixler (12:09:59) :
“Someone needs to keep Kerry and Boxer “in the loop” as they still beat the IPCC AGW drum.”
They also reject ClimateGate which is now under investigation of the UK Parliament.
Just let them continue to “drum their own grave”.
the longer Pachauri stays on as the IPCC head the better, and as the weeks go by the less credibility it has.
The real objective of those interested in climate sciences should be to see
(a) the organisation completely restructured with a new set of guidelines.
(b) control take away from the UN.
(c) dismantled altogether.
I think some political decisions have been taken in the back rooms after the Copenhagen shambles that someone has to be accountable for the political humiliation put on a number of leaders.
Hence the Times articles.
So the real question is who will be likely to replace Pachauri, and is the IPCC fixable.
Interesting. There are some inevitable conclusions to be made. Seeing that the proposal for funding was fundamentally flawed in a manner that should have been immediately obvious to experts in the field, one or several of the following conditions applies:
1. The applicants for funding were incompetent.
2. The applicants for funding were dishonest.
3. The committee granting the funding was incompetent.
4. The committee granting the funding was politically or financially corrupted.
There are no other alternatives.
Prediction:
The IPCC will disappear before 2035 – perhaps sooner.
Here is Dr Syed Hasnain the denier claiming no outside money funded his Glacier program, which appear to be a lie.
u.k.(us) (16:47:40) :
“it’s starting to look like “peace prizes” are given out, to influence/bolster the recipients.”
I can not think of a different way to give a public figure or some public organization a million dollars for unspecified future actions and not have it be called a bribe.
Can you?
If you handed the president of the United States a personal check for a million dollars because of something you wanted him to do, and he accepted it, you would likely both go to jail.
You beat me to it —
That clicking sound you hear from the toaster is the noise it makes shortly before the toast is ejected. The good doctor may be trying to put on a good face about his situation with his talk of lawsuits and staying on with the IPCC, but it’s nothing more than the posturing we’ve seen so often in the past, before the door hits the guilty party on the butt as they exit the building.
the updates are coming to fast to keep up with 🙂
one house of cards collapsing.
The ill fated Catlin Arctic Survey rears its’ ignominious head again in an article in todays UK Daily Telegraph. Quote ‘Pen Hadow admits battery was the problem on Arctic Climate Change’. The full story can be read at http://www.telegraph.co.uk under Catlin Arctic Survey. The cost of this farce was some £3,000,000 sterling shed no tears for the idiots who sponsered this comedy of errors
“Tony (16:58:12) :
Have alook at this.
http://www.teriin.org/index.php?option=com_pressrelease&task=details&sid=171
”
Oh my. Poor Icelanders. First they lose all their money with bad american mortgages, next they get professional advice from Pachauri.
it just goes to show that people who publically hold themselves out as scientific can lie with the best of them.
Particularly when they are backed into a corner.
Credibility increased because we pointed out the error — only after somebody else pointed out the error.
There are people who hold themselves out as scientific who lie, distort, and steal.
You’d be surprised who they are.
We are approaching the point where the Anthropogenic Global Warming Scare is turning into a criminal conspiracy involving the UN IPCC, the World Meteorological organization, Government Officials, Greenpeace, WWF, CRU and NASA scientists and Al Gore.
Why am I thinking of Guantanamo Bay or is it not big enough?
These are interesting times.
This is exciting. So much exposure of corruption and lies almost hourly now. I can’t wait to see how all this develops in the weeks ahead.
Asking if the IPCC is fixable is like saying is the Titanic fixable. No! Just create a new one from scratch as it’s impossible to go back and alter all the reports and literature generated by the IPCC to remove all their misconceptions, exaggerations and lies. Simply discard the IPCC and all their findings, and start from scratch. I would also add that NASA should get out of the game of climate monitoring and stick to space exploration (although I doubt they will do much there given China will overtake them soon enough).
Just a heads-up…major new errors discovered in IPCC report
http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2010/01/breaking-new-major-errors-found-in-ipcc-report-could-be-curtains-for-pachauri-and-ipcc.html
Steve Goddard (12:41:53) :
It says the total area of Himalyan glaciers “will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometers by the year 2035”. There are only 33,000 square kilometers of glaciers in the Himalayas.
************************
It’s worse than we thought.
This story WILL CLOSE down the IPCC (if true) It seems a insider is saying it was rigged on purpose.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245636/Glacier-scientists-says-knew-data-verified.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/24/climate-change-glaciergate-mckie has an appalling ill-informed opinion piece on ‘Glaciegate’ by Robin McKie.
What is interesting is not the tosh he serves up, but the robust almost unanimous rejection of the piece by commenters, with an extremely nice rejection by MoveAnyMountain.
This is in the Grauniad Environment Section no less. I think something is starting to melt away. Not glaciers, but public support for the AGW theory.
Ron de Haan (17:30:20) :
We are approaching the point where the Anthropogenic Global Warming Scare is turning into a criminal conspiracy involving the UN IPCC, the World Meteorological organization, Government Officials, Greenpeace, WWF, CRU and NASA scientists and Al Gore.
Why am I thinking of Guantanamo Bay or is it not big enough?
These are interesting times.
****************************
I’m starting to re-think my negative position on waterboarding. Hmm.
They all appear to be liars and thieves. And they all know each other. And they all appear to know the others are liars and thieves. A nest of vipers.
nofreewind (12:55:18) :
I have several “intermittent streams” on property I own on the south face of a mountain that usually dry up in summer. Common phenomenon of very small streams and those water-sucking deciduous trees.
The Eastern US has fairly even precip throughout the year, http://www.bluehill.org/climate/pre2009.gif shows Blue Hill Massachusetts averages 4″ (10 cm) every month of they year. India and many other regions have a very different pattern with dry weather much of the year and a rainy monsoon. Most of the water in the Ganges River, with a source in the Himalayans, is from monsoon rain. It covers a much larger area than do the glaciers.
Nev (17:39:55) :
Just a heads-up…major new errors discovered in IPCC report
**********************************
For all of us that have been waiting for this day when the darkness of this scam was deepest, it is satisfying to see the first dominos of justice start to fall. Whomever leaked the CRU emails, thank you. You were the first domino.
Sir, most esteemed Wattsupwiththat blogmaster, you might do a seperate post on this. A major university govdocs reference librarian sent this to me today:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7000063.ece
From The Sunday Times
January 24, 2010
UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters
Jonathan Leake, Science and Environment Editor
THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for
wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and
severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.
It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been
subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from
scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak.
The report’s own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt
the evidence was not strong enough.
The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of
global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public
debate. It was central to discussions at last month’s Copenhagen
climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for
compensation of $100 billion (£62 billion) from the rich nations
blamed for creating the most emissions.
Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change minister, has suggested
British and overseas floods — such as those in Bangladesh in 2007 —
could be linked to global warming. Barack Obama, the US president,
said last autumn: “More powerful storms and floods threaten every
continent.”
Last month Gordon Brown, the prime minister, told the Commons that the
financial agreement at Copenhagen “must address the great injustice
that . . . those hit first and hardest by climate change are those
that have done least harm”.
The latest criticism of the IPCC comes a week after reports in The
Sunday Times forced it to retract claims in its benchmark 2007 report
that the Himalayan glaciers would be largely melted by 2035. It turned
out that the bogus claim had been lifted from a news report published
in 1999 by New Scientist magazine.
The new controversy also goes back to the IPCC’s 2007 report in which
a separate section warned that the world had “suffered rapidly rising
costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s”.
It suggested a part of this increase was due to global warming and
cited the unpublished report, saying: “One study has found that while
the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the
values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure,
there still remains an underlying rising trend.”
The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which
the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at
the time the climate body issued its report.
When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat.
It said: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical
relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe
losses.”
Despite this change the IPCC did not issue a clarification ahead of
the Copenhagen climate summit last month. It has also emerged that at
least two scientific reviewers who checked drafts of the IPCC report
urged greater caution in proposing a link between climate change and
disaster impacts — but were ignored.
The claim will now be re-examined and could be withdrawn. Professor
Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a climatologist at the Universite Catholique
de Louvain in Belgium, who is vice-chair of the IPCC, said: “We are
reassessing the evidence and will publish a report on natural
disasters and extreme weather with the latest findings. Despite recent
events the IPCC process is still very rigorous and scientific.”
The academic paper at the centre of the latest questions was written
in 2006 by Robert Muir-Wood, head of research at Risk Management
Solutions, a London consultancy, who later became a contributing
author to the section of the IPCC’s 2007 report dealing with climate
change impacts. He is widely respected as an expert on disaster
impacts.
Muir-Wood wanted to find out if the 8% year-on-year increase in global
losses caused by weather-related disasters since the 1960s was larger
than could be explained by the impact of social changes like growth in
population and infrastructure.
Such an increase, coinciding with rising temperatures, might suggest
that global warming was to blame. If proven this would be highly
significant, both politically and scientifically, because it would
confirm the many predictions that global warming will increase the
frequency and severity of natural hazards.
In the research Muir-Wood looked at a wide range of hazards, including
tropical cyclones, thunder and hail storms, and wildfires as well as
floods and hurricanes.
He found from 1950 to 2005 there was no increase in the impact of
disasters once growth was accounted for. For 1970-2005, however, he
found a 2% annual increase which “corresponded with a period of rising
global temperatures,”
Muir-Wood was, however, careful to point out that almost all this
increase could be accounted for by the exceptionally strong hurricane
seasons in 2004 and 2005. There were also other more technical factors
that could cause bias, such as exchange rates which meant that
disasters hitting the US would appear to cost proportionately more in
insurance payouts.
Despite such caveats, the IPCC report used the study in its section on
disasters and hazards, but cited only the 1970-2005 results.
The IPCC report said: “Once the data were normalised, a small
statistically significant trend was found for an increase in annual
catastrophe loss since 1970 of 2% a year.” It added: “Once losses are
normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising
trend.”
Muir-Wood’s paper was originally commissioned by Roger Pielke,
professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, also an
expert on disaster impacts, for a workshop on disaster losses in 2006.
The researchers who attended that workshop published a statement
agreeing that so far there was no evidence to link global warming with
any increase in the severity or frequency of disasters. Pielke has
also told the IPCC that citing one section of Muir-Wood’s paper in
preference to the rest of his work, and all the other peer-reviewed
literature, was wrong.
He said: “All the literature published before and since the IPCC
report shows that rising disaster losses can be explained entirely by
social change. People have looked hard for evidence that global
warming plays a part but can’t find it. Muir-Wood’s study actually
confirmed that.”
Mike Hulme, professor of climate change at the Tyndall Centre, which
advises the UK government on global warming, said there was no real
evidence that natural disasters were already being made worse by
climate change. He said: “A proper analysis shows that these claims
are usually superficial”
Such warnings may prove uncomfortable for Miliband whose recent
speeches have often linked climate change with disasters such as the
floods that recently hit Bangladesh and Cumbria. Last month he said:
“We must not let the sceptics pass off political opinion as scientific
fact. Events in Cumbria give a foretaste of the kind of weather
runaway climate change could bring. Abroad, the melting of the
Himalayan glaciers that feed the great rivers of South Asia could put
hundreds of millions of people at risk of drought. Our security is at
stake.”
Muir-Wood himself is more cautious. He said: “The idea that
catastrophes are rising in cost partly because of climate change is
completely misleading. “We could not tell if it was just an
association or cause and effect. Also, our study included 2004 and
2005 which was when there were some major hurricanes. If you took
those years away then the significance of climate change vanished.”
Some researchers have argued that it is unfair to attack the IPCC too
strongly, pointing out that some errors are inevitable in a report as
long and technical as the IPCC’s round-up of climate science. “Part of
the problem could simply be that expectations are too high,” said one
researcher. “We have been seen as a scientific gold standard and
that’s hard to live up to.”
Professor Christopher Field,director of the Department of Global
Ecology at the Carnegie Institution in California, who is the new
co-chairman of the IPCC working group overseeing the climate impacts
report, said the 2007 report had been broadly accurate at the time it
was written.
He said: “The 2007 study should be seen as “a snapshot of what was
known then. Science is progressive. If something turns out to be wrong
we can fix it next time around.” However he confirmed he would be
introducing rigorous new review procedures for future reports to
ensure errors were kept to a minimum.
Political Junkie is right!
Political Junkie (17:09:20) :
Interesting. There are some inevitable conclusions to be made. Seeing that the proposal for funding was fundamentally flawed in a manner that should have been immediately obvious to experts in the field, one or several of the following conditions applies:
1. The applicants for funding were incompetent.
2. The applicants for funding were dishonest.
3. The committee granting the funding was incompetent.
4. The committee granting the funding was politically or financially corrupted.
There are no other alternatives.
Anthony knows “High Noon”. It’s time everyone watched Gary Cooper in “High Noon”. When the odds seem overwhelming, that is not the time to give in — if you are tough enough to take on the odds.
jack morrow (17:05:31) :
pyromancer 14:59:26
Sorry, but no one will get sued,lose their professorship,their dept. head or nothing. There are too many “folks in charge” that will prevent this IMHO.
I’ve seen it all from sorry generals to corporate misfits.Now all of us “deniers” will get a chance to see the no result too. Look at Mann-$4500,000 grant just rewarded. Anything happen to the “arctic explorers” from last summer? No, and how about Gore and his ten million degrees-no. He still is the poster boy for AGW. The US senate?No-not a peep. I’m sorry,but I have no expectations about any of this.
Jack, keep the faith. Take a look at the “Quote of the Week #77” — “Hide This After Jim Checks It”. Anthony’s dogged pursuit; Steve McIntyre’s amazing ability to cut to the chase over and over again since at least 2007. (I didn’t know the falsifications [the issue] even existed at that time, dummy me.) Rage is building at the way individuals in “respected” and “trusted” positions — U.N. (hah), research universities, professors of “science”, legislative committee chairs, heads of government departments, our wonderful environmental organizations (charities – NGOs), even our predominant energy corporations — all lying to us; all on the take in one way or another.
Don’t give up. No one gave Scott Brown a “snowball’s chance in hell” at the beginning in the election for the Kennedy seat. He emerged victorous because “the people” can smell scam once enough is exposed. That seat is now “The People’s Seat”.
This battle — and it is a battle, High Noon — is about the long haul. Keep repeating the names, know the financial links, know the fraudulent science by pseudo-scientists, understand about the feeding of students at all levels of our educational system lies about the science, hate the abominable altering of the raw historical temperature data that thousands of individuals have gathered faithfully over the years. Go after the main perpetrators of the fraud.
Jack Morrow and all the others like you (and me), we see it; we know the problem. Anthony presents it day after day in numerous imaginative and engaging forms. Let’s lose our cynicism and go forward with optimism and toughness.