The London Times is reporting:
“The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.
Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.”
See the Times article here
And from Richard North at The EU Referendum, this video news report link and his commentary:
Less than a week after he claimed the IPCC’s credibility had increased as a result of its handling of the “Glaciergate” scandal, Pachauri’s own personal credibility lies in tatters as The Times accuses him of a direct lie.
This is about when he first became aware of the false claim over the melting glaciers, Pachauri’s version on 22 January being that he had only known about it “for a few days” – i.e., after it had appeared in The Sunday Times.
However, Ben Webster writes that a prominent science journalist, Pallava Bagla – who works for the Science journal (and NDTV as its science correspondent) – claims that last November he had informed Pachauri that Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University and a leading glaciologist, had dismissed the 2035 date as being wrong by at least 300 years. Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”
Bagla interviewed Dr Pachauri again this week and asked him why he had decided to overlook the error before the Copenhagen summit. In the taped interview, he asked: “I pointed it out [the error] to you in several e-mails, several discussions, yet you decided to overlook it. Was that so that you did not want to destabilise what was happening in Copenhagen?”
Dr Pachauri replied: “Not at all, not at all. As it happens, we were all terribly preoccupied with a lot of events. We were working round the clock with several things that had to be done in Copenhagen. It was only when the story broke, I think in December, we decided to, well, early this month — as a matter of fact, I can give you the exact dates — early in January that we decided to go into it and we moved very fast.”
According to Pachauri, “… within three or four days, we were able to come up with a clear and a very honest and objective assessment of what had happened. So I think this presumption on your part or on the part of any others is totally wrong. We are certainly never — and I can say this categorically — ever going to do anything other than what is truthful and what upholds the veracity of science.”
Without even Bagla’s input, we know this to be lies. Apart from anything else, there was the crisis meeting under the aegis of UNEP – which we reported on Thursday – which concluded that the 2035 claim “does not appear to be based upon any scientific studies and therefore has no foundation”.
Read his complete essay here
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