Bombshell: IPCC chairman takes money from WWF

This is the kind of headline/story that reduces the creditability of WUWT overall. WWF was one of many sponsors of the event. So what? It is not like their sponsorship skewed the event any more than BMW did it? This is a non story not worthy of being pushed imo.

Add me to the minority position. If someone wants to hold a conference on sustainability, the WWF certainly has the funds and interest to support it. And maybe give some of the execs a nice boondoggle to India for a while.
Me too. This is a silly article and shows absolutely no evidence of unethical behavior on Pachauri’s part as far as this event is concerned. I thought I was going to read about evidence that the WWF had been paying him money under the table or something, not that the WWF was one of many sponsors to a conference that is held every year and that he attended. The WWF is concerned about preserving the world’s species, primarily against habitat encroachment and overharvesting by humans. They are not themselves “participants” in the CAGW theory — they simply accept that theory as being “proven science” and then act according to their charter on the basis of that information, which is difficult to fault. If the CAGW theory is falsified, or ameliorated into non-C AGW, one would expect that they would return to activities that targeted other proximate threats to wildlife populations.
In India there are many, from the poaching of a gradually shrinking pool of moderately rare species to the steady reduction of habitat as India’s population and wealth remorselessly increases. There is a strong conservation movement in India, one that I applaud (having lived there). Its jungles and forests are a magnificant global treasure, but they are very much at risk not from global warming or “climate change”, but from encroaching human populations, pollution, poaching, habitat restriction.
India is also susceptible to drought. Indeed, drought is historically one of the major killers in India, which relies on the monsoon for a great deal of its annual water. Some historic droughts have had death tolls in the millions, IIRC. There is, as has often been pointed out, no evidence that global warming is associated with an increase in the number or severity of droughts (or monsoons, or tropical storms, or …fill in your own favorite “extreme” weather) but again, the public mind listens to Al Gore, not the actual climate scientists that point out this lack of evidence. If the WWF officially opposes CAGW and hence CO_2 production, it may indicate a moderate lack of good judgement but nothing worse, and nothing that isn’t enormously commonplace at this point.
We are very fortunate in that the planet has stubbornly refused to warm for 15 years or so since the 1997-1998 super El Nino. Not because it was suffering any damage from the warming — I don’t think that there is any demonstrable damage resolvable from the natural noise in human disaster — but because it has started people thinking once again, has created a climate of doubt (so to speak) about the horrific scenarios that have been consistently painted by the CAGW extremists. It has caused a fair number of climate scientists — who are, for the most part, honest and just trying to do their best — to reconsider their own belief in the extreme values of climate sensitivity that have been bandied about for the last fifteen years (precisely corresponding with the flat temperature period).
This is an open question, and the Earth has reminded us of that. If the Earth stubbornly refuses to warm for another decade, or worse (for the CAGW folks) if it actually cools on a sustained basis for a few decades, then nearly everybody will reconsider their position in light of the new data. OTOH, if it spikes up in temperature to a new plateau 0.2 or 0.3 above its current temperature, well, one would hope that even people on this list would be equally open minded and willing to change their minds given new evidence. My own position is and will continue to be until there is enough evidence to change it that we don’t have any good idea of what the climate will do or model for predicting its changes, yet, nor do we have anywhere near enough reliable data to be able to build a reliable model.
There the self-correcting nature of science comes into play. Even if there have been thumbs on the GISS global surface temperature scales (as one might reasonably conclude from a look at the bias in the corrections) there are now too many sources of data that one cannot just “adjust” into showing a warming trend where the instruments themselves do not or amplfiying any trend that is there. Indeed, the longer the Earth holds at its current temperature, the more glaring any attempt to warm it by adjustment would be — there is already too great a disparity between the satellite temperatures and the surface temperatures. At this point, with the satellites, any warming observed has to be real and sustained to matter, and nobody really knows what we are going to observe over the next decade. I think a lot of climate scientists now “get” this.
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“There should be no reason for anyone to trust Mr. Pachauri again, as he has been compromised by activism.”
No. He’s been compromised by graft. Or so it would appear.

I’ve read the above comments with interest. My response to some of the concerns raised appears here:
Why Taking WWF Money Matters
The connections evident to me, the author of an entire book about the IPCC, are not always evident to others. As a writer I try to balance an awareness of that fact with respect for my regular readers. Me repeating the same data points over and over makes for tedious (and lengthy) reading.
In 2010, the InterAcademy Council report said that Pachauri was the “the leader and the face” of the IPCC, which he has chaired since 2002. If that is the case, he is equally “the leader and the face” of the institute called TERI, of which he has been the chief executive for more than three decades.
Mere months before the release of Part One of the IPCC’s brand new report, an institute run by its chairman is found to be funding that institute’s activities with activist money.
Respectfully, that is an important piece of news.