A report in The Times accuses the chairman of the IPCC of knowing before the Copenhagen conference that the claim in AR4 that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 was wrong:
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.
The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.
Full story here
Just in case there should be any doubt about this, The Times reveals that:
… a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error. He said that Dr Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”
and:
Mr Pallava interviewed Dr Pachauri again this week for Science and asked him why he had decided to overlook the error before the Copenhagen summit. In the taped interview, Mr Pallava 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?”
All of which makes the video interview with Pachauri on the BBC web site that I referred to in comment #60 on the CRU Email Hack: Don’t panic! Pachauri of the IPCC is on the case seem even more important. Have a look about 1min 50secs in. Answering a clear question about when he first knew about the Himalayan glacier problem Pachauri told the reporter that he had not known about it until about the 16th or 17th January.
I said, in the comment mentioned above, that I thought that this interview ‘could ‘ be the chairman of the IPCC’s death warrant. It now seems quite safe to drop the ‘could’.
If this story is true, and it certainly appears to be, then it would appear that Pachauri was well aware of the glacier problem in November, kept it quiet in the full knowledge that the supposed threat to the glaciers would be used to sway delegates at the Copenhagen summit, and that since then he has misled the media in an effort to cover-up. Remember that earlier on in January he was referring to claims that the Himalayan glaciers were not receding in the way that the IPCC has predicted as ‘voo-doo science. And that there are also allegations in the media that Pachauri’s TERI organisation received large sums in funding on the strength of what the IPCC had said in AR4 about the glaciers.
The fate of the IPCC chairman would seem to be beyond doubt now, but it is difficult to see how the organisation itself can survive this. If Pachauri knew about this problem before Copenhagen, then how many other people within the IPCC, and the UN, knew about it too?
h/t Anthony Watts
Does the name Robert Watson sound familiar? It should. He was ousted by the Bush administration – not for getting anything wrong – but for not saying what they wanted to hear.
As the Daily Telegraph describes Pachauri’s apointment: ” …..he has long been a controversial figure. Environmentalists were outraged when he became chairman of the IPCC in 2002, ousting the enormously respected Dr Robert Watson (now Defra’s chief scientist), after lobbying by the George W.Bush administration: Exxon had sent the White House a memo asking for Watson to be “replaced at the request of the US” as being “too aggressive” on climate change. Al Gore called him the “let’s drag our feet candidate”.”
Pachauri has been a big disappointment to climate sceptics everywhere. He’s got to go!
TonyN
As usual, PeterM has got it wrong again.
Pachauri has made some stupid mistakes, revealing poor judgment.
He is also suspected of having personal financial deals that depend on a continuation the AGW craze (like Al Gore, who also received a “Nobel Peace Prize”, but is not on the taxpayer payroll at present, so can do anything he wants to).
There are already voices withing the AGW movement that want to sacrifice Pachauri (in the desperate hope of salvaging the reputation of the IPCC itself in the process, by distracting the attention from all the scientific screw-ups, manipulated data and bad science behind the IPCC reports).
Pachauri is not “a big disappointment to climate sceptics everywhere”, as Peter opines, but he may very likely be the convenient “scapegoat” for the IPCC and the “big business” called AGW.
However, I do not believe sacrificing Pachauri, or even Pachauri plus Jones plus Mann plus even Hansen, will change the fact that “Climategate” is real, and that it is radically changing world opinion of IPCC and the whole AGW-craze.
The days of “believe me, baby, I’m a bona fide climate scientist with a big fat computer” are over.
And that is a good thing, in my opinion.
Max
Max
Max
PeterM
Regarding Pachauri’s predecessor, “the enormously respected Dr Robert Watson (now Defra’s chief scientist)”, this is the knuckle-head who opined over 10 years ago, “the science is settled”.
And this is supposed to be a “scientist”?
Duh!
Max
Manacker #3
Is Bob Watson really the originator of the phrase “The science is settled?”
I’ve seen it suggested many times by warmists that this phrase is apocryphal, or at least that it was never uttered by a scientist.
And while we’re in interrogation mode, does anyone know if Watson had any hand in hiring George Marshall to deliver psychobabble indoctrination courses to DEFRA employees for a 6-figure sum? (I’m relying on my memory of an article by TonyB, here, so feel free to delete or correct). Would a FOI request be in order here?
[TonyN: Yes! There is a very good website called WhatDoTheyKnow which makes the whole process quite painless if anyone feels like giving it a try]
geoffchambers (4)
It appears that Dr. Watson was the first to say, “the science is settled”, although others (including David Milliband) have parroted this phrase since then.
From a “Kyoto Report” by Henry Lamb, published by Sovereignty International Incorporated in December 1997 following the Kyoto Conference.
http://www.sovereignty.net/p/clim/kyotorpt.htm
Former US President Bill Clinton is quoted as having said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:William_M._Connolley/The_science_is_settled
.
And Al Gore:
So it appears that Watson was the first (but not the only) person to make that statement or a similar one.
Max
Peter, #1:
I seem to remember we’ve heard that one about Watson’s removal before. Have you got a saved copy?
In Max’s #5 he quotes Watson’s reported comments post Kyoto circa 1997, soon after his appointment as IPCC chairman:
That gives a pretty fair clue to why he had to go. This level of certainty four years before the TAR and a decade before AR4 does seem a little over confident. As I remember it, the discrepancies that Sietz identified between the TAR SPM and the main report didn’t help his prospects much either.
IPCC chairmen are elected by the representatives of the 193 countries that are signed up to the UNFCC. Although there is no doubt that the US lobbied to get Watson removed, and with good reason, it is hardly likely that they would have succeeded if he had had broadly based support. The people who made a fuss about his departure were the sNGOs, and one can well understand why they were upset. He was obviously just the man for them.
As you are in another hemisphere, you will have been spared the sight and sound of Watson as a frequent interviewee on UK television in the immediate aftermath of the CRU emails hitting the net. His line was that whoever was responsible was a thief, that this was a sceptic conspiracy to disrupt Copenhagen, that they were private mails, that they should be seen merely as a bit of banter between colleagues, that they effected only one research establishment,that they were perfectly innocuous if one considered them in context, that sceptics had persicuted CRU in an orchestrated campaign, that the emails had absolutely no impact on the credibility of climate science or the IPCC, and on and on. Evidently he hadn’t bothered to read any of them and at no point did I hear him admit that what had happened was extremely embarrassing for the UEA, even when he was asked if he accepted that it was.
Not one of the interviews that I saw introduced him as a former IPCC chairman. As I believe interviewees are usually asked how they would like to be introduced this seemed odd. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, when he appeared on Newsnight he was described as a leading climate scientist, and an adviser to DEFRA, but without mentioning that he works at the UEA.
After a day or two he dissappeared from the airwaves again, presumably because someone had worked out that he was rapidly making things worse.
TonyN,
You mean this one?
http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=124
I also gave the NS link below at the time, describing the process of Watson’s removal. The Daily Telegraph, somewhatsurprisingly, now say pretty much the same thing.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2191
PS I should add post #49 for the first link.
Only last year Carol Browner is credited with the phrase by the Washington Times, when commenting on Climategate:
The Director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, Carol Browner, agrees with rejected claims that e-mails stolen from a British university showed that climate scientists trumped up global warming numbers, saying she considered the science settled.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/25/climate-czar-says-e-mails-dont-change-anything/
“I’m sticking with the 2,500 scientists. These people have been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real,” said Ms. Browner.
She is a former legislative Director for Al Gore, EPA Administrator under Bill Clinton and a founding member of the Albright Group and Albright Capital Management. The firm assists businesses and other organizations with operating internationally, including the challenges of complying with environmental regulations and climate change.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albright_Capital_Management
This is a matter of public record and there is no suggestion that there is any conflict of interest between her involvement with the company and her current government position as “Energy Czar.”
Whilst not using quite the exact phrase, Lord Stern agrees with the sentiment:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6469714/Climategate-scandal-risks-a-deal-at-Copenhagen-says-Stern.html
http://www.ideacarbon.com/
The IDEAcarbon team are leading experts in the carbon and energy markets. We combine policy and carbon market analysis with proprietary tools for the analysis of carbon project credit risk. Our techniques assist our clients to manage and mitigate risk in today’s uncertain global carbon markets.
Our Advisors: http://www.ideacarbon.com/advisors/index.htm
Lord Nicholas Stern – Advisor to IDEAglobal Group, parent company of IDEAcarbon
This is a matter of public record and is recorded in the House of Lords Register of Interests. There is no suggestion that there is any conflict of interest between his involvement with the company and his promotion of carbon trading to the UK government, the EU and the IPCC.
http://www.actoncopenhagen.decc.gov.uk/en/ambition/achievements/september/stern-climate-finance
http://www.occ.gov.uk/activities/stern.htm
http://www.newstin.com/tag/us/121286464
IPCC Chair and Lord Stern Play Good Cop-Bad Cop
http://www.europa-eu-un.org/articles/en/article_9283_en.htm
Climate Change: Opening remarks of EU Commission President Barroso following meeting with Lord Stern and Dr Pachauri
This is a matter of public record and there is no suggestion that there is any conflict of interest………..
We read, perhaps in Delingpole’s UK Telegraph column, that Chairman Pachauri was “distracted” last November when he received unambiguous notice that his storied IPCC’s “glacial melt by 2035” hypothesis was not only an asinine typo but prima facie fallacious in hypdrologic terms.
Now it can be told: Pachauri’s “distraction” was not just COP15’s onrushing propaganda orgy, but an approaching publisher’s deadline. Too busy to proofread or draft a correction to his glacial Triumph of the Will, Rajendra-baby was completing a salacious dime-novel recounting the boudoir exploits of a (fictitious?) global-warming bureaucrat, hopping bedroom-to-bedroom from UN headquarters to European capitals plus Hot Zones east and south.
What’s next– revelations that so-called Cap-and-Trade, Green Gangsters’ trillion-dollar raid on global taxpayers, is sponsoring worldwide networks of underage brothels a la ACORN, perquisites for Warmist thugs when their five-minute day’s work is done? Don’t laugh… money isn’t everything, Climate Cultists as nihilistic Luddite sociopaths know literally no bounds.
I had to read this article in the Sunday Times twice because I couldn’t believe my eyes the first time.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7009707.ece
Among many other extraordinary insights concerning the processes of climate science, it supplies a partial answer to the question I posed in the last sentence of my header post on this tread.
This is a story that has a long way to go yet.