British Charity Commission covers up for a Warmist crook

Christopher Booker

Next weekend, as delegates from 194 countries gather in South Korea for a crucial meeting of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, their big talking point will be whether the IPCC’s chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri should resign – as a recent report from the world’s leading scientific academies seemed strongly to hint he should. The delegates face a dilemma. If they sack him, it would be a serious blow to the reputation of the panel, which has been central to the global warming scare since its founding in 1988. If he stays, it could severely damage the authority of its next major report, due in four years’ time.

Last winter, Dr Pachauri’s reputation took a hammering. On the one hand, there was the exposure of all those glaring and alarmist scientific errors in the IPCC’s last major report, produced under his guidance in 2007. On the other was the revelation in this newspaper of how his prestige as the “world’s top climate official” had coincided with a massive expansion in the fortunes of Teri, his Delhi-based research institute. Not only had Pachauri been appointed as an adviser to some of the richest banks and investment funds in the world, but Teri’s empire had mushroomed to include branches in Europe, North America, Dubai, Japan and South-East Asia.

When Dr Richard North and I came to examine this empire, our interest was drawn to Teri Europe, based in a suburban house in south London, which is registered under British law as a charity and is obliged to publish its accounts on the Charity Commission website. When we looked at these, however, they seemed rather odd. The figures showed the charity’s income and expenditure rising steadily in its early years – but from 2006 onwards they suddenly plunged to below £10,000 a year.

This was significant because £10,000 is the threshold below which a charity does not have to publish full accounts. Yet we knew that in these years Teri Europe was rapidly expanding, receiving sums way above that threshold. These included several payments from the UK government, such as £30,000 for the services of an employee of Dr Pachauri’s Delhi office to act as his co-editor on the IPCC’s 2007 Synthesis Report.

When we approached Teri Europe with our evidence, the charity’s secretary immediately admitted that there were “anomalies” in the accounts. The Charity Commission agreed to investigate. Not the least point of interest was that the charity’s trustees – “responsible,” in the commission’s words, “for approving the accounts before submission” – included, alongside Dr Pachauri, two other luminaries of the global warming establishment. Sir John Houghton was a founder of the IPCC, and had long played a key role in it. Sir Crispin Tickell was one of Houghton’s most influential allies back in 1988, as “our man at the UN” and as the adviser who talked Mrs Thatcher into enthusiasm for global warming at that crucial moment (a fervour she later disavowed).

Since it seemed that both Teri Europe and the trustees were in serious breach of the Charity Commission’s rules, this has led over recent months to a protracted series of exchanges with the commission.

First, the names of Houghton and Tickell swiftly disappeared from the list of trustees. Then, in May, after an audit by a firm of accountants, the commission’s website showed dramatically revised figures for one of the three years in question. The charity’s income for 2008 had now risen from £8,000 to £103,980, its expenditure from £3,000 to £97,419. But the figures for the previous two years were unchanged. The commission explained that it had allowed this “to save the charity a considerable amount in accounting fees”. It also claimed that the errors were due to the charity’s “inexperience in preparing accounts”, though the figures for earlier years showed no sign of “inexperience”.

I therefore put 10 searching questions to the commission. Why, for instance, was its website continuing to give false information? Would the commission show equal leniency to other bodies found to have provided misleading accounts, since normally a charity would be severely penalised for such offences?

When eventually I had a lengthy response it didn’t give a direct answer to any of my questions, except to say they were not prepared to disclose the date on which Houghton and Tickell had resigned as trustees. But clearly the commission had been embarrassed by my questions, since over the next few weeks revised figures for two more years appeared online. Income for 2007 rose from £9,000 to £49,878, for 2006 from £7,000 to £16,610 – showing that nearly £150,000 had not previously been disclosed. And, as can be seen from the commission’s website, the accounts are now shown to have been up to “1,246 days overdue”.

Doubtless, compared to the difficulties Dr Pachauri may face next weekend in holding on to the post which has helped him so to extend his institute’s fortunes, these accounting anomalies in one of its branches may seem pretty small beer. But an important question remains: why, when they came to light, did the Charity Commission struggle so long and hard to give this particular charity such an extraordinarily easy ride?

SOURCE





Al Gore Heckled During Global Warming Speech

Crowd chants "you are a fraud!" - "global warming is hoax!" during Al Gore's global warming speech in Tampa






Nothing Wrong With Our Graph

Dr. David Whitehouse



The GWPF’s graph, displayed on the GWPF's homepage masthead, showing that the global average annual temperature hasn’t changed this century, drawn against a nice blue backdrop, is making a few people see red. Why this is I don’t exactly know as their logic, in contrast to their anger, isn’t entirely clear. Perhaps it is because it neatly summarises the uncertainties in climate science as well as common misconceptions (as was the intention) that some commentators find too uncomfortable to address, instead becoming deniers of basic scientific data. It certainly seems a difficult fact for some, but inconvenience is one thing, facts are another.

Those who complain that the graph is wrong, if they are to be fair and consistent, should now target the Royal Society in their sights as it has admitted this in its recent brochure on the science of climate change that the recent spell of warming ended in 2000.

It is not alone. The Journal Science has said the pause in global temperatures is real, as do many refereed scientific papers in numerous journals. Also in State of the Climate in 2008, a special supplement to the August Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, no less, confirmed that in the past ten years the HadCRUT3 temperature data (there are problems with this data set regarding its reliability and how it calculates averages but it is probably the best we’ve got) shows no increase whatsoever. Their analysis showed that the world warmed by 0.07 +/- 0.07 deg C from 1999 to 2008, not the 0.20 deg C expected by the IPCC. Corrected for the large 1998 El Nino event (that made 1998 the hottest year on record) and its sister La Nina, the last decade’s trend is perfectly flat. There were even comments in the so-called Climategate emails along the lines of the temperature not increasing and “it’s a travesty” that we can’t explain it.

Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit also holds this view, saying yes in a BBC interview in response to the question; Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically significant global warming.

We live in the warmest decade, no one doubts that (though possibly not as warm as it was 1000, 2000 and 3000 years ago), and this explains why the world’s warmest years are clustered during that period. Look at the order of the warmest years, however, and you will see they are jumbled up and sit well within each other’s errors of measurement. There is no upward trend, just a plateau.

The latest warm period began in 1980. This means we have had 30 years of it. It is clear from looking at the data that it is composed of two distinct periods and it is not cherry picking to identify these as they stand out in the data. There is the period 1980 – 1995 when the world warmed, and the period 1995 – 2010 when it didn’t increase its temperature. We are told, by some, that 30 years is about the minimum for statistically significant climatic data to emerge. However, at 15 years each these two periods are now of equal statistical significance. If the standstill continues then it will soon become the dominant climatic factor of the past 30 years.

It is interesting to also note that the warming between 1980 and 1990 was not in itself statistically significant. This means that it was only the 5-year warming period 1990 -1995 (before it ceased) that has made all the difference to the statistics and significance of Earth’s warming in the past 30 years!

No climate computer model predicted the recent standstill but they have been used with hindsight to explain it. It has been suggested that natural cycles, oceanic cooling and solar influences, are responsible. The Met Office Hadley Centre ran a series of computer climate predictions all of which had programmed into them the 0.20 deg C long-term IPCC trend. They found that in many of the computer runs there were decade-long standstills, but none of 15 years. If one took that 15-year figure at face value it would mean that the data already accumulated has falsified the IPCC’s basic assumptions about the rate of warming. However, bearing in mind that the proposed explanation for the hiatus was arrived at post-hoc and relies on the same computer models that failed to predict it, one should be cautious. Modelling is one thing, real-world data is another and we should never confuse the two.

So whilst a few might not like it, there is nothing wrong with the GWPF’s temperature graph which is based on freely available HadCRUT3 data. In fact, it would be scientifically justifiable to replace it with a constant straight line with data scattered around the mean (the scatter between 2009 and previous years is insignificant). The graph is a useful discussion point that illuminates some of the problems in climatic research today. It has achieved its purpose in encapsulating a basic scientific fact about climate change and in stimulating debate.

SOURCE





Russian forecasters: Coldest European winter in 1,000 years on its way

After the record heat wave this summer, Russia's weather seems to have acquired a taste for the extreme. Forecasters say this winter could be the coldest Europe has seen in the last 1,000 years.

The change is reportedly connected with the speed of the Gulf Stream, which has shrunk in half in just the last couple of years. Polish scientists say that it means the stream will not be able to compensate for the cold from the Arctic winds. According to them, when the stream is completely stopped, a new Ice Age will begin in Europe.

So far, the results have been lower temperatures: for example, in Central Russia, they are a couple of degrees below the norm.

“Although the forecast for the next month is only 70 percent accurate, I find the cold winter scenario quite likely,” Vadim Zavodchenkov, a leading specialist at the Fobos weather center, told RT. “We will be able to judge with more certainty come November. As for last summer's heat, the statistical models that meteorologists use to draw up long-term forecasts aren't able to predict an anomaly like that.”

In order to meet the harsh winter head on, Moscow authorities are drawing up measures to help Muscovites survive the extreme cold.

Most of all, the government is concerned with homeless people who risk freezing to death if the forecast of the meteorologists come true. Social services and police are being ordered to take the situation under control even if they have to force the homeless to take help.

Moscow authorities have also started checking air conditioning systems in all socially important buildings. All the conditioners are being carefully cleaned from the remains of summer smog.

SOURCE





The Curious History of 'Global Climate Disruption'

More revealing history from Russell Cook

Global warming alarmists are seriously considering rebranding their fear campaign in the face of public skepticism.

A September 16 Fox News report analyzed the suggestion by Science Czar John Holdren to rename global warming "global climate disruption," while also offering this tidbit: "In a 2007 presentation, Holdren suggested a similar phrase change -- "global climatic disruption."

The newest suggestion prompted many satirical alternatives, however, his own 2007 variant actually goes back to 1997, revealing a far more serious association with an eco-advocacy group.

According to a May 14, 1997 endorsement request to scientists made by directors of Ozone Action, "The enclosed statement was initiated and written by six of your colleagues who hope you will join them in raising awareness about the threat of climate change."

As I detailed in my July American Thinker article, Ozone Action seems to be the epicenter of a successful campaign to portray skeptic scientists as tools of Big Coal and Oil executives. The Statement the directors refer to is seen here: Scientists Statement on Global Climatic Disruption. One of the other six was Jane Lubchenco, current head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and founder of the Leopold Leadership Program, which she and another Statement signer, Hal Mooney, created in 1998 to "train mid-career academic environmental researchers to communicate effectively to non-scientific audiences." While she was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1997, the AAAS website had a direct link to Ozone Action's page for the Statement. Arguably, the Leopold group, given Lubchenco's association with Ozone Action, would perhaps be good at communicating the IPCC version of global warming, while not speaking highly of skeptic scientists.

While the Scientists Statement was said to be "initiated and written" by the six scientists and promoted by Ozone Action, an alert by the Union of Concerned Scientists in March 1998 about an unpublished Wall Street Journal op-ed letter suggests that the origin of the effort wasn't necessarily arranged by the scientists: "In an effort organized by Ozone Action in response to the Petition Project, this letter has been endorsed and circulated by a prominent group of scientists."

The associations take a turn for the worse upon mention of the Oregon Petition Project, a list of scientists questioning the idea that human-induced CO2 disrupts the climate. Condemnations of the Petition having fake names are viral across the internet, apparently tracing back to a May 1, 1998 Seattle Times article by AP writer H. Josef Hebert:

Several environmental groups questioned dozens of the names: "Perry S. Mason" (the fictitious lawyer?), "Michael J. Fox" (the actor?), "Robert C. Byrd" (the senator?), "John C. Grisham" (the lawyer-author?). And then there's the Spice Girl, a k a. Geraldine Halliwell: The petition listed "Dr. Geri Halliwell" and "Dr. Halliwell."

Sounds initially damaging, until you read the same AP writer's long version written on the same day:

John Passacantando, executive director of the environmental group Ozone Action, scoffed at any claim that Robinson's petition represents the widespread views of scientists. He said his group scoured the list and found dozens of names unlikely to be scientists: "Perry S. Mason" (the fictitious lawyer?), "Michael J. Fox" (the actor?), "Robert C. Byrd" (the senator?), "John C. Grisham" (the lawyer-author?). There also were Drs. "Frank Burns" "Honeycutt" and "Pierce" (Remember the trio from M A S H?), not to mention the Spice Girl, a.k.a. Geraldine Halliwell, who was on the petition as "Dr. Geri Halliwel" and again as simply "Dr. Halliwell."

Several groups, or just Ozone Action? In his May 20, 1998 letter to the NY Times, Passacantando actually names "Hawkeye Pierce and BJ Honeycutt," but he fails to mention any other groups spotting those. Ozone Action's Brandon MacGillis' April 24, 1998 letter to the Washington Times (pg. 7 here) said:

Several members of the scientific community have looked over the signatories listed on the petition's web site, and they did not recognize a single scientist known for work on climate change. ... I did recognize one name: Geri Halliwell, a k a Ginger Spice.

It's possible to view 1998 archive web pages of the Petition (oldest link here, which may be for a page dating from June 1998 or earlier) and see if names matching the M*A*S*H doctors really are there, or if Richard Lindzen, S. Fred Singer, and Sherwood B. Idso -- scientists Holdren and Lubchenco should have been familiar with -- are there. If it's troubling to find the Mason and Grisham names on the list, does that imply that an example like the current Arizona state government is equally troubling because of Hollywood celebrities on its elected officials list, like Dean Martin, Paul Newman, and Linda Gray?

The trouble for Holdren lies in the Greenpeace archive scan page following MacGillis' letter; a scan of a letter by Holdren and George Woodwell to the International Herald Tribune, November 14-15, 1998, mimicking the Passacantando and MacGillis letters; and the H. Josef Hebert article.

Or was Holdren's/Woodwell's letter ghostwritten by Ozone Action? That was an assertion posed to the ombudsman at the now-defunct media watchdog magazine Brill's Content, as described in his May 1999 analysis of the IHT letter and protests by Candace Crandall (an associate at Fred Singer's Science & Environmental Policy Project), Passacantando, and IHT editor Michael Getler (the same Getler who is now ombudsman for PBS). Ombudsman Kovach's analysis is marvelous to read, with a powerful ending about the importance of fact versus opinion. Two troubling statements about Ozone Action's association with science speakers are made, the first here:

"... complicating this is Ozone Action's acknowledgement in its own letter that the group helped Woodwell with research for the op-ed."

And second, about Holdren/Woodwell:

"They also said that they had used Ozone Action, with whom they have worked frequently on global warming issues, to place articles in newspapers which had carried an earlier article they wanted to dispute."

Scientists certainly are glad to accept good research help on other matters and assistance to broaden public understanding of their work. But Holdren, Lubchenco, and other scientists allied with Ozone Action, a group that was the epicenter of Ross Gelbspan's campaign initiated in 1996 to portray skeptic scientists as tools of Big Coal and Oil executives, and Holdren himself became entangled in highly questionable allegations about the Petition Project.

Each set of accusations starts to crumble under simple fact-checking and leads only to more questions about the motivations and actions of all involved. When the mainstream media failed to notice these red flags over a decade ago, they essentially became part of the orthodoxy of man-caused global warming believers, telling everyone to ignore, ridicule, ostracize, and -- in regard to the latest horrific video -- strongly suggest in ironic fashion that nonbelievers are under "no pressure" to change their ways.

This cumulative effort prompts an unavoidable question: Do the believers ultimately have no confidence that the underlying science can be defended on its own?

SOURCE (See the original for links)





Warmist says "Patchy" has got to go

That a railway engineer was made chief climate authority shows how political, rather than scientific, the IPCC is

By Fred Pearce

In scientific circles they call him Patchy. His real name is Rajendra Pachauri, the supremo of climate science at the United Nations, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He picked up the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of his organisation less than three years ago. But it was pride before the fall. I lit the fuse under Patchy's chairmanship eight months ago. Now, I say he should go.

If governments won't fire him when the IPCC meets at the Korean seaside resort of Busan next week, he should fall on his sword. For the good of the battered reputation of climate-change science. For the good of the planet.

Patchy is an amiable, bearded, vegetarian railway engineer and cricket fanatic, born under the British Raj in India. He has been showered with prizes, including Indian of the Year in 2007, and held jobs all over the world. He got the IPCC chair in 2002, after the Americans fell out with the then chairman, a Brit called Bob Watson, who is now our Government's chief environmental scientist.

But Patchy is not a climate scientist. And he is 70 years old now. There have been too many mistakes during his eight years at the top of the IPCC. And he has made too many of them worse. Patchy is no longer part of the solution to telling the world about climate science. He is part of the problem.

How did I light the fuse under Patchy? I am a science journalist - one who happens to believe that man-made climate change is virtually beyond doubt.

The story began last December when a Canadian expert on glaciers called Graham Cogley emailed me to say that an IPCC report published two years before, with Patchy named as first author, contained a dreadful error. It claimed that, thanks to global warming, all the Himalayan glaciers would be gone within a generation - by 2035.

It was a stunning claim, but simply not true, said Cogley. The warming was certain enough, but the melting would not take 25 years; more like 350 years. But, he went on, the reason the crazy claim was in the report, which had been signed off by 1,000 scientists, almost 200 governments and the entire UN system, was an article I had written a decade before.

My blood ran as cold as any glacier. Could this be true? I could believe my story had been proved wrong. But journalism is not supposed to be peer-reviewed science. And peer-reviewed science is most certainly not supposed to be journalism. This kind of thing shouldn't happen.

The IPCC report gave as its source for the prediction a report by the Indian branch of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). So what was the WWF's source? The only one it gave was a short news item I wrote in New Scientist magazine in 1999, quoting a top Indian glaciologist and university vice-chancellor called Syed Hasnain.

He had told me he was about to deliver a report, based on four years' study, that said the central and eastern Himalayas would be ice-free by 2035.

When the claim turned up in the 2007 IPCC report, I smiled to think I'd had the story eight years before. But Cogley, a glaciologist at Trent University in Canada, said: 'Fred, it's still wrong.

The glaciers are up to half a kilometre thick; they are not going to disappear overnight. It will take centuries.'

What does a journalist do? He writes the story, of course. I wrote an article explaining how, far from substantiating Hasnain's claim, the IPCC had clearly not checked it at all.

When it said: 'Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high,' it had just copied and pasted the WWF's words.

And this is where Patchy comes into the picture. A quick apology and retraction from the boss of the IPCC, and chief author of the report, would have defused the situation. Instead, when Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh accused the IPCC of being 'alarmist' about the melting Himalayas, Patchy accused him of 'voodoo science'.

He turned a one-line mistake into a diplomatic incident. And the voodoo science was at the IPCC.

Oh, and one other thing. By now my discredited source, Hasnain, had ceased to be a vice-chancellor and had taken up a new post. He was head of glaciology at the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a prestigious Indian think-tank set up by Tata, an industrial conglomerate best known for making tens of millions of Indian trucks. TERI is run by - you guessed it - Dr Rajendra Pachauri.

After my article laying bare the unedifying story appeared last January, the row became headline news round the world. Inevitably, it became known as 'Glaciergate'.

A few people criticised me for writing the original story without checking whether other glaciologists agreed with Hasnain. Fair cop, maybe, though he was vice-chancellor of one of India's top universities at the time and his findings were about to be reported to the International Commission on Snow and Ice. Can nobody be trusted?

Then a few people criticised me for revealing the truth and undermining the IPCC's credibility. Well, sorry guys, we all have to try to get our facts right.

But the IPCC's big mistake was not owning up to the error promptly. As they used to say about the original '-gate' - the Watergate break-in that brought down US President Richard Nixon - it is the cover-up that is politically deadly, not the original offence.

Only after a week of worsening headlines did the white flag go up from inside Patchy's bunker. But by then his rashness in defending the indefensible had turned the IPCC into a laughing-stock. Sometimes I want to cry for an agency stuffed with good, conscientious and clever people brought down by such stupidity.

Since then Patchy has been pursued by journalists looking for new IPCC errors. They had plenty of material to work with: more than a thousand pages of the IPCC's five yearly assessment, published under his name in three volumes in 2007.

Actually, most of it stood up to the challenge pretty well. In parts it was, if anything, too cautious - for instance, playing down growing fears among climate scientists about scary tipping points in climate that could destroy the Greenland ice cap or trigger super-hurricanes and mega-droughts.

But the second volume, on the possible impacts of climate change, was less sound. It was co-edited by a British academic called Roger Parry of Imperial College London, who has so far managed to evade the flak.

Some of the mistakes in that volume were silly. It said 55 per cent of the Netherlands was below sea level. The real figure is 26 per cent, but the Dutch government gave the wrong stats. No big deal. It got the references all wrong for a claim that 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest could die within a few decades from heat and drought. Sloppy again, but no big deal.

What about this, however? A headline claim in the report was that African farming is heading for the abyss.

And very soon. 'Projected reductions in [crop] yield in some countries could be as much as 50 per cent by 2020,' it said. Phew. That captured public attention - not least because Patchy highlighted it in several of his public speeches. Tens of millions would starve.

But was it true? The footnote referenced an 11-page paper by a Moroccan called Ali Agoumi that covered only three of Africa's 53 countries: Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. Agoumi's paper, which had not gone through scientific peer review, simply asserted without giving any evidence or sources that 'studies on the future of vital agriculture in the region have shown... deficient yields from rain-based agriculture of up to 50 per cent during the 2000-2020 period'.

What studies? He has never said. Even Agoumi did not claim the changes were caused by climate change. In fact, harvests already differ by 50 per cent or more from one year to the next, depending on rainfall. In other words, Ali Agoumi's thin, un-reviewed paper said nothing at all about how climate change might or might not change farm yields across Africa.

That's not to say climate change won't cause droughts, or that droughts are not big killers in Africa. This is a serious matter. It deserves serious attention. So how much more disgraceful is it that the IPCC stats - stats highlighted personally by Patchy - were junk?

When I raised these issues, the only answer I got was an email from Patchy's co-editor Roger Parry from a 'working retreat' on the Caribbean island of Montserrat.

He said the criticisms of his report were ' clamour without substance'. Patchy agreed.

Even so, the UN became sufficiently scared by all the bad press for the IPCC that it set up a high level commission to investigate. This InterAcademy Council included nominees from Britain's prestigious Royal Society.

The council's report, published at the end of August, was damning. Chairman Harold Shapiro found that Parry's climate impacts report in particular showed a tendency to 'emphasise the negative impacts of climate change', many of which were 'not sufficiently supported in the literature, not put into perspective or not expressed clearly'.

How did that happen? Well, they used 'non-peer-reviewed literature', such as WWF reports, without the findings being 'adequately evaluated' - perhaps a polite phrase for the IPCC's disgraceful use of that old standby of students: copy and paste.

This farrago coincided with another scandal in climate science. With a certain lack of originality, we hacks called it Climategate. This was the release of all those emails from scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. The scientists were in charge of trying to piece together the history of changing global temperatures, using thermometer records, tree rings or whatever other information they could get their hands on.

The emails did not, as some claimed, reveal a massive conspiracy-to con us about climate change. But they certainly showed scientists using underhand tactics to silence their critics - critics who claim the tree rings don't show anything worth knowing about temperature, and that some of the data on global warming of recent decades are contaminated by the local warming effects of urbanisation.

Climategate was bad news for Patchy too. For the emails reveal University of East Anglia scientists sidelining criticisms of their own work when compiling IPCC reports - prompting the InterAcademy Council to call for the IPCC to adopt a 'rigorous conflict-of-interest policy'. Why wasn't there one already? Ask Patchy.

Even grubbier, when someone put in a Freedom of Information request, asking to see emails discussing drafting of the IPCC report, the University of East Anglia scientists emailed colleagues asking for those emails to be deleted. This was against IPCC rules and possibly against British law.

Did Patchy know about this? Probably not. Should he have been policing how the IPCC authors went about their task? Surely that was his job. What was his response when the emails were published online? He defended the scientists.

There is a pattern of behaviour here, I think, from the man with arguably the most important role in protecting the world from climatic meltdown. Complacency. Loyalty to those who do not deserve it. Intemperate statements at inopportune times.

Climate scientists should not tolerate this. Environmentalists should not tolerate this. The UN should not tolerate this.

The InterAcademy Council's report to the UN refused to say that Patchy should go. But this was humbug. It said that, in future, IPCC chairmen and other top leaders should serve only one term, overseeing one five-year scientific assessment. The council said it was nothing personal. But it reached that conclusion because of what happened on Patchy's watch. Surely it must apply to him above all.

Let's be clear. The basic problem here is not climate science. There is very little doubt that the world has been warming this past half century. And little doubt either that man-made pollution is mainly to blame. The problem is the IPCC.

Nobel Prize or no Nobel Prize, the 22-year old organisation is too important to be allowed to fail. It is badly in need of reform. A fresh start with a new, less accident-prone chairman.

Will they bite the bullet in Busan? There are stories going around that Western governments are unwilling to wield the knife because they fear a backlash from India and the developing world. How ridiculous.

After the 'voodoo science' row over Glaciergate, I doubt Pachauri has many friends in the Indian government anyway. Even so, if he isn't going to be pushed, he should jump. Sorry, Patchy, but time is up.

SOURCE

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