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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Glaciergate? Please no more gates! Can we try something else like “Goons of Glacierville” or “Pachauri’s Predicament”? Gate is an over used suffix, imho.
http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2010/01/breaking-glaciergate-worsens-ipcc-used-fake-claim-deliberately-official.html
Ugh. It seems the strategy is to put away the shovel and take out the backhoe.
so it’s all about getting other peoples money
asking for money has taken many forms and this video shows a way so similar to the global warming grant money acquisition technique….particularly from 2:45 to 3:10, the East Anglia, CRU team is highlighted 😉, (East Anglia is actually mentioned)
Political Junkie (17:09:20) :
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.
5. All of the above.
5 seems to be the correct answer.
This whole episode is utterly disgusting. Scandal after scandal involving embezzlement of public money is being revealed, yet the UN and Govts plod on unconcerned, claiming the science behind global warming scaremongering is real. To me its frustrating in the extreme.
If Pachauri doesnt go after this I dont know what we can do.
An interesting article in the UK Daily Mail states –
….Dr Murari Lal [Lead author for AR4 Asia chapter] 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….
“We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245636/Glacier-scientists-says-knew-data-verified.html
Harry (15:22:46) :
No free wind
“This glacier melt thing is nonsense regarding drinking water. We have no glaciers in the eastern US and only a small amount even in the West.”
Living in Western Washington State…if our Glaciers were to disappear a big chunk of our drinking water would as well. I accept in many areas of the world people depend on rain water runoff and man made reservoirs for drinking water, or deep wells.
Out here we depend on Snow melt.
The Columbia River is mostly snow melt as well, we depend on that for electricity.
No Glaciers = ”No Snow to melt in the summer”.
All true Harry. On the other hand if glaicers are neither growing or shrinking, the run off is the same as if there is no glacier, just the timing is different. Now I am not going into the science of what is actually happening with India’s glaciers. I will say though that people have built dams for a long time, to both conserve the water and to have supplies in the summer. A good C.B. estimate would be an important thing to have before we change the world for a maybe problem.
This story is different from Climategate because it has a new dimension.
Climategate was about a group of enthusiasts bending scientific methodology to show results that suited their theories. In climategate the theory became a political cause, a hysterical belief system that in the minds of the “scientists” justified their loose methodology. What they did was immoral but it might have had an element of sincerity.
Glaciergate/Pachaurigate/IPCCgate is more disreputable because what has been exposed is new motive; The new motive to profit financially by inventing completely unproven theories and wrapping them up in scientific jargon and respectability.. For almost a decade Pachauri has harvested funds from the institutions like the EU who have fallen for his pseudoscience. He was allowed to do it because he was at the top of IPCC, the one with the responsibility to make sure that the science in the IPCC reports had been properly scrutinised and peer reviewed.
This scandal has broken the reputation of the IPCC.
Harry said;
” Out here we depend on Snow melt.
The Columbia River is mostly snow melt as well, we depend on that for electricity.
No Glaciers = ”No Snow to melt in the summer””.
—–
Harry,
If you read again what nofreewind said, you will appreciate that the water you drink is, for by far the greater part, water that fell on the Rockies the winter before you enjoyed it spilling out of your faucet. The fraction of that fine water that fell on mountain-tops hundreds of years ago is very small. If the latter was what you relied on exclusively, you’d be flushing a lot less often.
Nev: Falsification of the hurricane figures has been going on in the IPCC for a long time; th4e following eg is form 2005, and there are other examples – the manipulation is systematic:
Dr Chris Landsea, former IPCC author who is the world expert on hurricane & cyclone activity, resigned from the IPCC with the following statement (letter in full on this url):
http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/LandseaResignationLetterFromIPCC.htm
“It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an
unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global
warming. Given Dr. Trenberth’s role as the IPCC’s Lead Author responsible
for preparing the text on hurricanes, his public statements so far outside
of current scientific understanding led me to concern that it would be very
difficult for the IPCC process to proceed objectively with regards to the
assessment on hurricane activity. My view is that when people identify
themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements
far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the
credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish
our role in public policy.
My concerns go beyond the actions of Dr. Trenberth and his colleagues to how
he and other IPCC officials responded to my concerns. I did caution Dr.
Trenberth before the media event and provided him a summary of the current
understanding within the hurricane research community. I was disappointed
when the IPCC leadership dismissed my concerns when I brought up the
misrepresentation of climate science while invoking the authority of the
IPCC. Specifically, the IPCC leadership said that Dr. Trenberth was speaking
as an individual even though he was introduced in the press conference as an
IPCC lead author; I was told that that the media was exaggerating or
misrepresenting his words, even though the audio from the press conference
and interview tells a different story (available on the web directly); and
that Dr. Trenberth was accurately reflecting conclusions from the TAR, even
though it is quite clear that the TAR stated that there was no connection
between global warming and hurricane activity. The IPCC leadership saw
nothing to be concerned with in Dr. Trenberth’s unfounded pronouncements to
the media, despite his supposedly impartial important role that he must
undertake as a Lead Author on the upcoming AR4.”
[worth reading in full]
The UK ‘Times’ newspaper is becoming intriguing! Stories in January have :
‘UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters’
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7000063.ece
‘UN climate change expert: there could be more errors in report’ [Actually, they mean Pechauri!]
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6999051.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1
..and the times broke the ‘Glaciergate’ story. Compare these to December’s stories such as ‘Losing Nemo: Is there time to save the seas?’ about oceanic acidification and similar :
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/eureka/article6933689.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1
There does seem to be a distinct change, and I must stress that this is a Murdoch newspaper. Although he may not interfere with the day to day editorial content I do not think they would change direction without his okay. If so then it may be that his global empire may have been given leave to study AGW critically. If so this could rapidly speed up the rate at which AGW crumbles – it can’t stand up to scrutiny, just look at what the past week has done to the IPCC and Pechauri.
In the UK it may also have a knock on effect on the Tory leader, David Cameron. He has been trying to show himself as greener than green, but fellow Conservatives are more skeptical. If both the Times and the Telegraph are being critical of AGW, and UKIP gain support by their anti-AGW stance, then the Conservatives may change policy to an anti-AGW stance. It would mean they could point to all the pain the UK voters will have to suffer in support of AGW countermeasures, which, while bad enough, are worse in the midst of a recession.
Ric Werme (17:51:52) :
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.
Ric, I knew I took a rather simplistic view of the situation. It just doesn’t make sense to me that more precipitation, and stronger monsoons, even with increased temp is going to cause water shortages. Why not just build a few damns, instead of impoverishing the world, when it won’t work anyway.
A Google of monthly precipitation India shows that most of the rain in India falls in July-Sept. The question would be, it is going to be so warm in July-Sept that snow would not fall in the Himalayas, but instead rain? Snow falling in Aug-September, the height of the monsoon season, would be locked away with the Northern Hemisphere fall cooling and would slowly melt the next spring/summer, just like it does in the high mountains of the western US. I haven’t completely explored this issue, but it seems like common sense to me.
http://www.si-india.com/weather.htm
Anyone heard from Al Gore lately? Would love to hear his take on Climategate and Glaciergate.
The more the AGW defenders deny the obvious the worse it will be for them in the future. Turn yourself in now and maybe we’ll go easy on you.
Whomever leaked the docs in climategate should be given a medal!
Sam (19:47:36) :
Nev: Falsification of the hurricane figures has been going on in the IPCC for a long time; th4e following eg is form 2005, and there are other examples – the manipulation is systematic:
Dr Chris Landsea, former IPCC author who is the world expert on hurricane & cyclone activity, resigned from the IPCC with the following statement (letter in full on this url):
http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/LandseaResignationLetterFromIPCC.htm
“It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an
unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global
warming. Given Dr. Trenberth’s role as the IPCC’s Lead Author responsible
for preparing the text on hurricanes
What’s fascinating to me is that there seems to be a bit of a New Zealand climate mafia at work within the IPCC. Trenberth is an ex-pat kiwi, and New Zealanders were all over WG1 and WG2 (the latter contained the false Himalayas claim.
See: http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2010/01/nzs-top-climate-scientists-oversaw-ipccs-most-embarrassing-error-said-nothing.html
If you look at the list of NZ ‘reviewers’ on WG2 referenced at that link, they’re full of NZ government policy analysts. In Air Con I recall a mention that the then NZ Prime Minister Helen Clark (now no. 3 at the UN) was all gung-ho on climate change and wanting NZ to lead the world.
The Climategate emails are full of references to the Kiwis at NIWA like Renwick and Salinger. Salinger should have picked up on that fake Himalayas claim.
It’s almost as if NZ is where the line between politics and science blurred the most, and look at the influence on the process.
Then of course there’s the fudged temperature data from NIWA that hit the news after Climategate, and that led to examinations of the temperature data elsewhere…
I dunno, maybe I’m joining too many dots…but it just seems the kiwis are donkey-deep in this.
Norm in Calgary (20:07:04) :
Turn yourself in now and maybe we’ll go easy on you.
LMAO
Yeah, it’s like Norms says, turns yourselfs in and maybes
we’lls goes easys on ya…see!
It may well be true that Pachauri is not corrupt, in the same way that Gore may not be corrupt. The mere fact that they personally make money out of Climate Change does not mean that they are necessarily wrong. If there is corruption, it may well be at a lower level. Certainly, this amateurish error about Himalayan glacier melt would suggest that this is true. We can certainly entertain the idea that lower echelons are feeding their masters with what their masters want to hear. This is not unusual.
The problem is that, if this is so, it is not unlikely that it is so in every UN department. Corruption may very well be from the bottom up, if the ‘up’ have already decided what they want ‘the bottom’ to say. If this is true, then it is the worst possible form of corruption since its tentacles spread throughout the organisation.
But the problem goes further, does it not? This ‘spread out’ corruption then afflicts politicians. Politicians have no option but to accept the ‘advice’ they receive from the likes of Pachauri because they themselves have created the beast.
And then we have the latest cock-up – the very expensive battery failure in the Arctic expedition. Oh dear! Never mind, the hand drills still showed that the North polar ice is melting, even though the adventurers were 350 miles from the pole. And therefore as a result of their adventure, the North polar ice is going to melt shortly. Pull the other one! Maybe there was nothing wrong with the battery. Maybe the results were wrong and the battery claim was the easy way out. Who knows?
But this ‘bottom up’ corruption goes further, does it not? How about the claims of the World Health Organisation? How corrupt are they? Even worse, how corrupt are the politicians who place their trust in the statements of the WHO? To what extent is the WHO a convenient excuse for politicians to interfere in the way in which we live our lives?
Am I a conspiracy theorist? Maybe, but, if I am, it is only because the blatant facts lead me there. For example, it is blatantly untrue that alcohol in the UK is cheap. It is blatantly untrue that passive smoking is killing people. It is blatantly untrue that, for the vast majority, salt in our food is dangerous (our bodies get rid of excess salt by excretion, although some people’s bodies do not work as well as others in that respect).
If our politicians took less notice of health scares and corrupt advice, we would all be much better off. Unfortunately, the need to increase tax revenue seems to be paramount.
Norm in Calgary (20:07:04) :
Anyone heard from Al Gore lately?
There’s been heat on him, like several million degrees.
Interesting. Not entirely surprised that the Kiwi’s are at the nexus, knee-deep in Climategate donkey $hi+.
Nev (20:22:14) :
Sam (19:47:36) :
What’s fascinating to me is that there seems to be a bit of a New Zealand climate mafia at work within the IPCC…
It’s almost as if NZ is where the line between politics and science blurred the most, and look at the influence on the process…
I dunno, maybe I’m joining too many dots…but it just seems the kiwis are donkey-deep in this.
Nev (20:22:14)
…
I dunno, maybe I’m joining too many dots…but it just seems the kiwis are donkey-deep in this.
——————
The good Dr North at EUReferendum has an intriguing possible link between Pachauri and NZ scientist Andy Reisinger:
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/keeping-it-in-family.html
“I dunno, maybe I’m joining too many dots…but it just seems the kiwis are donkey-deep in this”
Countries like NZ have everything to gain and little to lose. NZ already produces a lot of geothermal and hydro power, and doesn’t have a resource base like coal. Therefore, if they can politically shove this in a direction that already suits them and their marketing (NZ is marketed as a ‘green’ country), then why not? NZ is also a heartland for Greenpeace and other environmental organizations, and your average Kiwi man on the street is usually pretty ‘green’. If NZ can make it’s neighbouring countries have higher energy costs, while not drastically increasing their own, then it’s a net win for them.
It’s closest neighbour, Australia, on the other hand, has large amounts of coal and resources, and can produce some of the cheapest energy in the world (that’s why Australian houses have the largest average floor space of anywhere). Any change to the energy production in Australia results in restriction of energy and industry. That’s why Australia traditionally wanted nothing to do with Kyoto and AGW, and it’s only in the last two years that Rudd has been blabbing about it that any change in direction has happened at all. However, given the employment (and tax) base of Australia relies of digging stuff up and burning or melting it, it won’t take much of a wind of change to get people back being either skeptical or neutral of AGW – witness the stand in the Senate – although that was partly caused by the Green party rejecting the cap and trade bill for not going far enough. Deep down, I think the average Australian is more worried about losing their job than emitting c02, and that’s where the vote will hit the ballot box.
New Zealand is an absolute core group of hoaxers. While the MSM down there is complicit or ignorant, any science student could detect the gross alteration of raw data and the substitution of data that emphasizes the totally hypothetical global warming. One would think it would be a hard pretense to keep up in that winter sweater wear sales remain steady.
Pachauri reveals the IPCC’s real agenda.
The IPCC’s Pachauri said that overall the conclusions reached in his group’s report were “robust, appropriate, and entirely consistent with the underlying science”.
“The world is on the path of unsustainable development and we will have to change our lifestyle,” he said.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/01/2010123125937664296.html
UPDATE3: Pachauri now bizarrely claims in a press interview that the IPCC’s credibility has been strengthened.
Hey, this kind of declaration is not new. Wasn’t it Briffa or Jones that stated that the fact that there was divergence in the tree ring proxies actually strengthened the case for man-made global warming?
brc (21:45:18) :
“Countries like NZ have everything to gain and little to lose. NZ already produces a lot of geothermal and hydro power, and doesn’t have a resource base like coal. ”
Not so. NZ has not kept up with developing its energy resources. The ‘greens’ and the greenish inclination of New Zealanders has restricted its development of any energy in recent years through its Resource Management legislation. The are ‘fluffing around’ with windmills at present but even these are problematical as they despoil the landscape that is important to the tourist industy. – Catch 22 ! It has abundant coal resources which it won’t increase in use (because of its self concious and pretentious ‘green image’) – but it hypocritically sells its coal to China instead so they can burn it!
New Zealand is very dependent upon its dairy and tourist industries. Both of these are target industries from the AGW mob because of CO2 emissions and ‘air miles’ .
So you see it is in fact quite vulnerable. The Labour government’s ‘love affair’ with the U.N . and anyone who likes to contol everyone’s lives induced it to ‘rush in’ to be first to impliment climate contol legislation. The present Conservative governmnent is simply a paler shade of pink – so – more of the same I’m afraid.
BTW Dr. Jim Salinger (ex NZ prominent climateologist) gets a nention in the infamouse claimategate emails. He trained at East Anglia university at some time and would have been deeply involved in all the shinanigans as I see it.
Hence the temperature records that show the incline!
M