The climate blunders continue

The Times of London reports another major screw up by the InterGOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change. And they report that a former chair of the IPCC, Robert Watson, "has warned the United Nations' climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility."

The IPCC claimed that global warming was likely to reduce crop yields in north Africa in half by 2020. The IPCC loves apocalyptic claims like this. This was so popular that IPCC chair, Rajendra Pachauri (who has no credentials in climate science at all), and UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, have publicly quoted this section of the IPCC report. In addition the IPCC thought the claim was so important that they included it in the IPCC's Synthesis Report, "the IPCC's most politically sensitive publication, distilling its most important science into a form accessible to politicians and policy makers." Among the lead authors of this report os Pachauri himself.

Pachauri wrote: "By 2020, in some countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%. Agricultural production, including access to food, in many African countries is projected to be severely compromised.” Pachauri has made this claim publicly in highly reported meetings. The problm is that there is NO verified, scientific evidence for the claim. Watson says that the report shows "no data supporting" the claim.

According to the Times this claim lists as its source a policy paper written by the International Institute for Sustainable Development. The Institute is an environmentalist think tank, not a scientific body and the paper never underwent peer-review. The IPCC had repeatedly claimed that its apocalyptic vision of global warming is based on the science, and the science alone. Yet we have seen a growing body of evidence that the IPCC report is hobbled together using advocacy literature from left-wing, non-scientific sources.

In recent days the IPCC was asked by the ministers of the Dutch government to correct other errors from the report regarding the Netherlands. According to the IPCC report Holland is threatened by global warming because more than half the country is below sea level. While the Dutch are known for reclaiming land from the sea, they haven't been that industrious. The IPCC's report doubled the number.

Apparently an IPCC chart on energy production was also incorrect. In this case they reported on the potential of wave energy. The IPCC claimed the source was a company called Wavegen, note that the source is company, not peer-reviewed literature. But what the IPCC showed in their chart differs significantly from the chart that Wavegen published and Wavegen says they haven't changed the chart they published. But Wavegen also says they aren't the source for the chart as they merely reprinted it. Apparently the IPCC didn't verify the numbers, cited a secondary source for them, and wasn't interested into whether the claims were based on peer-reviewed information or not.

The Telegraph reports numerous other uses of non-peer reviewed literature in order to bolster the IPCC's political agenda including "ten dissertations" by students seeking their degrees. One such "unpublished dissertation was used to support the claim that sea-level rise could impact on living in the Nile delta and other African coastal areas, although the main focus of the thesis, by a student at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, appears to have been the impact of computer software on environmental development."

As for the false claims about the Himalayan glaciers the Yale Climate Media Forum has released a fairly in-depth article outlining precisely how the IPCC screwed up. This report appears to have pieced together all the evidence into a coherent whole. The YCMF says that the controversy was created by the IPCC alone and has "prompted intense, and warranted criticism of the IPCC review process." They do note that the "likely" source for the IPCC's "copied and pasted" claim was "an Indian environmental magazine." Think about that. The IPCC "copied and pasted" information from a magazine, no peer-review included, and reported the claims under the mantle of "peer-reviewed science."

And while Pachauri had been droning on about "one" mistake the reality is the paragraph on glaciers along contained three major errors. The YCMF lists them:

1. The first sentence predicts disappearance (a 100 percent loss) by 2035. The next sentence predicts an 80 percent loss. Nonetheless, the first prediction is made using more confident language. 2. The second sentence begins with “Its,” ungrammatical if it is referring to “glaciers” and unclear otherwise. It’s as if the two sentences were simply copied and pasted from different sources. 3. The approximate area of the Himalayan glaciers is 33,000 km2, so the 500,000 km2 starting figure in the second sentence is off by a factor of 15, and the decreased area predicted in 2035 - 100,000 km2 - is three times greater than the current Himalayan glacier area.

YCMF notes that one reviewer, David Saltz, caught and reported the first two errors but that the IPCC went ahead and published the paragraph unchanged. The third error couldn't have come from the World Wildlife Fund report that was cited originally because those numbers aren't found there. Instead they come from a paper by V.M Kotlyakov, as this blog reported two months ago. Kotlyakov wrote about all "extrapolar glaciers" not just the Himalayan glaciers and, as we reported, he listed the year 2350, not 2035. But when an environmental publication reported on these reports it made errors. And it appears the IPCC merely copied the claims as this publication reported them, errors and all. In other words, the IPCC didn't even bother to look at the science, they merely copied text from environmental publications and reported information as factual, without checking sources, or verifying data.

Climate Science Watch reported on how the IPCC "relied on an err0r-riddle online article when it it discussed the likely state of Himilayan glaiciers in 2035. It did so dispite questions raised by some reviewers." YCMF also shows that the IPCC had a chart on glacial melting which was "directly copied" from the environmental magazine in question. What is a dead give away is that the IPCC copied the chart which had its own internal errors—that is the data in the chart had a mathematical error.

The environmental magazine claimed that Pindari Glacier retreated 2,840 meters between 1845 and 1966. The magazine then said this meant the glacier was retreating by 135 meters per year! Do the math yourself, you will see that it is wrong. Had Pindari retreated 135 meters per year, from 1845 to 1966 (121 years) then it would have retreated 16,359 meters, not 2,840. The magazine had divided by 21 years not 121 years and thus got the wrong result. The IPCC, that paragon of science and peer-review, merely copied its material from this advocacy publication and that meant copying the bad math as well. So, in haste to report disaster, two major numerical errors were made. Someone transposed the year 2350 to 2035 and someone divided 2,840 by 21, instead of 121. And no one bothered to check original sources or verify the math.

Consider the main theory I hold regarding the IPCC and their reports. I do not contend that they intentionally distort or lie about information. I contend that they act precisely as we would expect someone to act who is absolutely convinced they have the right suspect apprehended. I see this similar to how police and prosecutors act when they arrest someone and are absolutely convinced of that person's guilt. If they find contradictory evidence they tend to ignore it. Anything that seems to point a finger at the suspect is emphasized. If they don't ignore exculpatory evidence they will go to great lengths to debunk it but make little effort to verify evidence that points a guilty finger.

Periodically they come across evidence that seems to prove the innocence of the suspect, but they are able to dismiss it, even if they can't debunk it. They convince themselves that "all the other evidence" proves their case. So this one piece that seems to contradict their claims can't be right. They may not know why it is wrong but they know it must be wrong. So they sweep it under the rug, not because they are trying to convict an "innocent" man, but because they are convinced they are convicting a "guilty" man. It is highly unethical either way, but these people are normally not attempting to incarcerate the innocent but tend to honestly believe they are seeking justice.

The scientific process is supposed to reduce the likelihood of this same sort of distortion. But the legal process has safeguards as well, to prevent this from happening, yet it happens all the time. The reason for that is that the process relies upon the investigators voluntarily following the rules. But often investigators see the rules as an obstacle to achieving the "right" goal. So they will selectively ignore, or bend the rules. This is why evidence, which proves a man's innocence, is often hidden from defense lawyers, even though the rules say that shouldn't happen.

We understand the courtroom is supposed to help prevent this by having open debate, with the defense and prosecutors appearing before a supposedly neutral judge and jury. The adversarial system supposedly helps justice come to the forefront. And it usually does, provided everyone plays by the rules. But with the IPCC there is no adversarial system. There are only prosecutors writing the final reports and the judges involved already know the guilty of the suspect before the evidence is heard.

There is an adversarial system in that papers may be published in any one of many journals. But the Climategate emails shows how the clique of warming scientists try to distort that process to guarantee only one side is heard. Even the papers that get published are easily ignored by the IPCC as the prosecutors then seek out papers (and apparently a large amount of non-scientific claims as well) that bolster their own theory. After selecting which evidence is submitted and which is ignored it is passed up a bureaucratic ladder where each new judge or prosecutor has the guilty verdict in their pocket and is just writing up the judgment, not checking the facts and making sure the rules have been followed.

This tendency to have the guilty verdict already written out is the reason that the errors that have been exposed all lean in one direction. All the major errors have predicted dire consequences if the IPCC's political agenda is ignored. So far none of the errors have underestimated catastrophe, only exaggerated it. That is because prosecutors err in their assumptions of guilt, not innocence. And the IPCC is a "scientific" body the same way the district attorney's office is a judicial one. They may be part of the process but they are advocacy bodies meant to achieve a specific goal. The district attorney is out to secure convictions, leaving the verdict up to the court. But the IPCC is acting both as prosecutor and court, and that makes it even more suspect.

Warming advocates feel the heat.

The beware-of-warming crowd is starting to feel the heat. And it isn’t because of a warming planet either. It almost seems as if everything that could go wrong for them, is going wrong.

Now, I would never be one to claim that weather anomaly is proof that anthropogenic warming is wrong. I know that particular weather disproves climate change. We all know that such things can only prove that warming exists. In the realm of warming activism weather is a one way street. So Katrina was proof of warming. That 1998 was a particularly warm year was proof of warming. That California experiences droughts is all part of warming. Ditto for droughts in the UK, or floods, either will do. But still those nasty cold winters that seem worse than usual are never proof of anything but they do cause the public to wonder.

And this winter has been another very nasty one. Consider the poor people on Hiddensee, an island just off the German mainland. This resort island is completely ice bound. The German military has been flying in to rescue tourists on the island. Resident of the island rely on trade with the mainland for their food supplies and so shelves were getting bare. The military also flew in food. According to Spiegel the sea between Hiddensee and the island of Rügen “is now an ice sheet around 30 centimeters (12 inches) thick. An icebreaker failed to make it through to Hiddensee on Monday forcing the authorities to use helicopters to supply the island and pick up trapped vacationers.” Spiegel says that the ice “is not expected to melt until the end of February” which seems to imply that regular helicopter food deliveries will be required. Some tourists, trapped on the island when ferry service as shut down due to the ice, didn't heed the advice of authorities and walked across the Baltic Sea in order to get home.

Like the awful cold that gripped North American and the UK, this weather front is bringing record snows as well. Roofs have collapsed due to the weight of snow and “hundreds of drivers were forced to spend the night in their cars and truces on the A45 and A5 highways due to heavy snowfall.”

Floridians might also be wondering where the warming went. The L.A. Times reports “January’s bitter cold may have wiped out many of the shallow-water corals in the Florida Keys.” The paper reports that “given the depth and duration of the frigid weather” some damage was expected. But Meaghan Johnson of Nature Conservancy reported widespread, severe damage. “Star and brain corals, large species that can take hundreds of years to grow, were as white and lifeless as bones, frozen to death, she said. Dead sea turtles, eels and parrotfish also littered the bottom.”

The paper says that Florida Fish and Wildlife reported “that a record number of endangered manatees had succumbed to the cold this year—77, according to a preliminary review. The previous record, 56, was set last year.”

Meanwhile the scientists who have led the campaign to convince the world of the dangers of warming are under scrutiny as never before. Major media sources, for the first time in memory, are starting to investigate the InterGOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change and the tiny band of warming advocates who make up the elite in that field. The New Zealand Herald, the largest newspaper in the country, recently editorialized about the need for “facts, not anecdotes” from the IPCC.

The editors at the Herald, previously staunch warmers themselves, noted that they way to discredit a report is to find one mistake. But when it comes to the IPCC: “more than one mistake had been found” and the errors (if unintentional) “are hardly peripheral.” The editors listed claims regarding the Himalayan glaciers as one example and said that the IPCC was “notified of this [error] in 2006 and yet the claim appeared in the 2007 report.” They also lament the IPCC using “a student dissertation and an article in a climbing magazine” as evidence for “disappearing ice in the Andes, the European Alps and Africa.”

The Herald editors then refer to the IPCC claims about “extreme weather” which “turns out to have been based on a paper that had not been peer-reviewed or published at the time.” The paper even “included a caveat that the evidence was insufficient” but the IPCC deleted all such caveats from their report. The Herald, while not yet ready to abandon the comforting fear of warming, says:

The IPCC's reputation is not helped now by the argument of authority its supporters have employed for so long. Criticism was dismissed as conceit in the face of a "scientific consensus" that by implication could not be wrong.

The editors note that “the consensus has been wrong, or at least careless on several points” and that the IPCC “urgently needs new leadership and a return to strict scientific rigour if it hopes to be taken seriously again.”


Even one the staunchest media allies of the warmers, the left-wing Guardian newspaper in the UK, has started investigating claims of the warmers and finds them wanting. They report the scientists at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, the home of climategate “’hid’ data flaws.” The report says:

Phil Jones, the beleaguered British climate scientist at the centre of the leaked emails controversy, is facing fresh claims that he sought to hide problems in key temperature data on which some of his work was based.

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.

Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones's collaborator, Wei- Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had "screwed up."

The Guardian, of course, is not willing to question warming orthodoxy itself, but they do say their investigation does “call into question the probity of some climate change science.” To be precise it doesn’t call climate change science into question, but climate change theory.

In particular the Guardian investigate the date used to show warming in China and says there were “apparent attempts to cover up problems with data from Chinese weather stations…” The Guardian explains the problem:

The history of where the weather stations were sited was crucial to Jones and Wang's 1990 study, as it concluded the rising temperatures recorded in China were the result of global climate changes rather the warming effects of expanding cities.

The IPCC's 2007 report used the study to justify the claim that "any urban-related trend" in global temperatures was small. Jones was one of two "coordinating lead authors" for the relevant chapter.

The leaked emails from the CRU reveal that the former director of the unit, Tom Wigley, harboured grave doubts about the cover-up of the shortcomings in Jones and Wang's work. Wigley was in charge of CRU when the original paper was published. "Were you taking W-CW [Wang] on trust?" he asked Jones. He continued: "Why, why, why did you and W-CW not simply say this right at the start?"

Already London’s Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph have been exposing IPCC errors and distortions fairly regularly. But it isn’t a small feat to have shaken the confidence the editors at the New Zealand Herald had previously shown for the IPCC. And it is a huge step when the very left Guardian starts exposing some of the antics of leading warming advocates.

It’s bad enough that nature is not cooperating with warming theory. But, if more main steam media outlets starting turning a critical eye on the IPCC and its core group of scientist/activists, the whole political agenda at work here could unravel.

Photo: Trapped tourists from Hiddensee ignore official warnings and walk across frozen sections of the Baltic Sea in order to get home.

More IPCC improprieties says BBC

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change purports to be a scientific body, or at least wants people to see them that way. In reality they are a very political body which uses science to justify specific political agendas. And, in my opinion, the political agenda comes before the science.

We have already reported on the IPCC's use of material from a political lobby, reporting it as if it were peer-reviewed science. That was the World Wildlife Fund's report that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. (Actually the trail is more convoluted than that, so read the original post on the matter here and here.) As a BBC column noted: "This turned out to have no basis in scientific fact, even though everything the IPCC produces is meant to be rigorously peer-reviewed, but simply an error recycled by the WWF, which the IPCC swallowed whole."

That same column now describes "another howler" from the IPCC.

Then at the weekend another howler was exposed. The IPCC 2007 report claimed that global warming was leading to an increase in extreme weather, such as hurricanes and floods. Like its claims about the glaciers, this was also based on an unpublished report which had not been subject to scientific scrutiny -- indeed several experts warned the IPCC not to rely on it.

One has to wonder precisely how much material the IPCC uses which openly violates their own claim that they only use peer-reviewed material for their reports. Instead, it appears they use any report that bolsters their political agenda, whether peer reviewed or not.

This blog has previously reported that leading experts on hurricanes have specifically repudiated the IPCC claims in the past. But now it appears that the author of the material, quoted by the IPCC to bolster their extreme scenario, himself repudiates the IPCC's use of his material. The BBC column says: "The author, whod didn't actually finish his work until a year after the IPCC had used his reasearch has now repudiated what he sees as its [the IPCC's] misuse of his work."

So the IPCC took a partially done study, that had not gone through peer-review and used it to try to whip up fear about more severe hurricanes. The author of the report, when he finished it, concluded: "There is insufficient evidence to claim a statistical link between global warming and catastrophe loss." Ooops, the IPCC jumped the gun. Of course, according to their own PR and protocol they shouldn't have even used the report in the first place.

The BBC piece notes that the British government spent millions on account of the unsubstantiated, and now repudiated, claim by the IPCC.

Yet it was because of this -- now unproved -- link that the British government signed up to a $100 billion transfer from rich to poor countries to help them cope with a supposed increase in floods and hurricanes. It was also central to many of the calculations in Britain's Stern Report, which might now need to be substantially revised. Now after Climate-gate, Glacier-gate and Hurricane-gate -- how many "gates" can one report contain? -- comes Amazon-gate. The IPCC claimed that up to 40% of the Amazonian forests were risk from global warming and would likely be replaced by "tropical savannas" if temperatures continued to rise.

The column says the claim about the Amazon is "backed up by a scientific-looking reference but on closer investigation turns out to be yet another non-peer reviewed piece of work from the WWF." It notes that the authors of the piece, cited by the IPCC as scientific proof, are not scientists at all. One is "an Australian policy analyst" and the other "a freelance journalist" for the left-of-center Guardian and a "green activist." The author of the BBC column, Andrew Neil, writes:

Every time I have questioned our politicians about global warming they have fallen back on the mantra that "2,500 scientists can't be wrong", referring to the vast numbers supposedly behind the IPCC consensus. But it is now clear that the majority of those involved in the IPCC process are not scientists at all but politicians, bureaucrats, NGOs and green activists. They may -- or may not -- still be right or wrong but what has become clear in the past couple of months is that, contrary to what many leaders have claimed, the science as promulgated by the IPCC is very far from "settled" and that there are important questions still to ask. The mainstream media has been slow to do this. The bloggers, too easily dismissed in the past, have set the pace with some real scoops -- and some of the mainstream media is now rushing to catch up.

All I can say is: "Amen." Whether or not you think man-made global warming is melting the glaciers, I can say that they credibility of the IPCC is melting away even faster.

Finnish TV show looks at Climategate.

A television program from Finland looks at what was revealed in Climategate. In Finnish with English subtitles. About 30 minutes.

Another IPCC scandal is fully exposed.

On Dec 24th, 2009, this blog reported on a scandal that was brewing within the exclusive club of hysterics known as the InterGOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC had reported, as highly probably, that the glaciers in the Himalayas would melt, due to global warming, by the year 2035.

Expert glaciologists said the claims were total rubbish. But the IPCC was refusing to back down. The head of the IPCC, who has no degrees in the fields over which he presides, launched some very public attacks on people who actually are experts on glaciers because they were challenging settled climate dogma—I mean theory.

This blog said that the evidence used by the IPCC was bogus. None of it was based on peer-reviewed papers, contrary to IPCC rules. And we noted that the IPCC “expert reviewer” responsible, Murari Lal, cited several sources for this startling claim—not a one of them considered a legitimate scientific source. He quoted a claim by World Wildlife Fund, another by UNESCO and a brief mention in an article in New Scientist. None of these had peer review or were legitimate sources for the purposes to which the IPCC put them.

As this blog pointed out even these three sources were deceptive. The WWF report was actually quoting the article from New Scientist. It was not a source, merely someone else repeating the same unverified claim. I wrote:

To have this happen right on top of the Climategate episode does not bode well for the IPCC and it's political agenda. Whatever case the skeptics may or may not make on warming, the antics of the IPCC and the top warming alarmists around the world gives more than enough reason to see this more as a political movement than a scientific one.

I stand by that assessment. And now we learn more including that the IPCC may withdraw this bogus claim entirely. So much the settled science and consensus, at least when it comes to glaciers in the Himalayas.

Lal is trying to excuse his bogus claims, published by the IPCC as fact. He says: “I am not an expert on glaciers and I have not visited the region so I have to rely on credible published research. The comments in the WWF report were made by a respected Indian scientist and it was reasonable to assume he knew what he was talking about.” So, Lal admits he published this extreme claim about glaciers on nothing more than the hearsay report from a political lobbying group like the World Wildlife Fund. There was no attempt to verify the claim, there was no scientific data investigated, no peer reviewed reports read. It was published simply because one IPCC office “assumed” it must be right. Why that assumption? Because skepticism is discouraged by the IPCC.

I have argued that the IPCC is acting like cops and prosecutors who are convinced they got the culprit in some horrendous crime. Because they are so sure they ignore evidence to the contrary and anything that appears to point in the direction of their “suspect” is lauded as being all the proof they need. Once you are so sure you have it right you simply grab anything that seems to verify your case while routinely ignoring everything that doesn’t. I believe that this is what was behind the IPCC publishing entirely fictitious statements about the glaciers in the Himalayas.

The London Times now reports that the IPCC is on the verge of withdrawing the claim. The Times also wonders, as do I, why someone with no expertise in the field of glaciers “was overseeing such a report.” So much for having experts at the IPCC acting as the gatekeepers for what is, and isn’t acceptable climate science.

They report that New Scientist ran an article, not a scientific paper, which was entirely based on a “short telephone interview” with Syed Hasnain, “a little-know Indian scientist.” Hasnain had no scientific research to back up his thought on the glaciers. He has admitted it was entirely “speculation.” Now Lal says: “If Hasnain asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, then I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments.” Consider that Lal seems to be saying that an outright refutation from the original source is necessary to remove the claim but that absolutely no scientific research was needed to include it in the first place.

As controversy about these absurd claims were circulating the author of the original article in New Scientist, Fred Pearce, came forward with some additional facts. He said: “Hasnain told me that the was bring a report containing those numbers to Britain. The report had not been peer reviewed or formally published in a scientific journal and it had no formal status so I reported his work on that basis.” It had no “formal status” at all but it confirmed the scare mongering of the politicians who run the IPCC and that was just good enough for them.

Pearce says that since then he obtained an actual copy of the report and discovered “it does not say what Hasnain said.” The date 2035 was entirely absent and the report only discussed some glaciers not the entire range of glaciers.

The Times says that this rather unsubstantial report in New Scientist remained ignored from 1999, when it was published, until 2005 when the lobbying group World Wildlife Fund used it to prove the glaciers are melting. As they report: “it was a campaigning document rather than an academic paper so it was not subjected to any formal scientific review. Despite this it rapidly became a key source for the IPCC when Lal and his colleagues came to write the section on the Himalayas.”

Let us pause to recap this. A scientist, using pure speculation, makes an off-the-cuff claim to a reporter. It is allegedly based on a paper that was never subjected to scientific scrutiny. But it doesn’t matter since even the paper didn’t substantiate the off-the-cuff remark. That remark is then taken by a lobbying group and publicized a few years later, as if it were fact.

At this point the pure speculative, off-the-cuff, inaccurate portrayal of a paper that was never subjected to scrutiny, is picked up by a IPCC author who is writing about a field of which, by his own admission, he knows very little and is no expert. Once it appears in the IPCC report it is then treated as global warming gospel.

According to the Times, “Pearce said the IPCC’s reliance on the WWF was ‘immensely lazy’ and the organization needs to explain itself or back up its prediction with another scientific source.”

Just remember this the next time someone cites the IPCC report as an impeccable example of science at work. I never thought that myself. I considered it an impeccable example of how politicized science works and this sorry affair seems to support that assertion. In the world of politics you don’t need science, all you need are speculative assertions made without foundation and spread by political lobbyists. That is certainly what we got here.

UPDATE: Here is how New Science, the source of the IPCC claim, has editorialized on the matter. They aren't happy. Click to enlarge.

And HOLD YOUR HORSES IT GETS WORSE.

Get this: the source for the false claim was Syed Hasnain, who used pure speculation as the basis for his remarks. The IPCC spreads these remarks as if they are proven science. The head of the IPCC is a bureaucrat, with no credentials in climatology named Rajendra Pachauri. For my take on Pachauri go here. Pachauri, who has been called a leading climate expert by left-wing publications, studied economics and industrial engineering. He does have business interestes, however, in alternative energy, a field bolstered by warming hysteria. When Hasnain's speculation was being questioned by leading experts in the field, Pachauri was very vocal in defending the bogus claims. He went on the attack against anyone questioning Hasnain.

Along with running the IPCC, Pachauri is a director of something called The Energy Research Institute. It appears that Hasnain, the source for the false allegation about the glaciers, is actually employed by Pachauri's TERI. Using the IPCC claims of a Himilayan crisis TERI went to the Carneige Corporation to seek funding for "research, analysis and training on water-related security and humanitarian challenges to South Asia posed by melting Himilaya glaciers." They received $500,000 for that research. With that money Pachauri set up a team a TERI headed by Hasnain. How incestuous! So, Hasnain invents a "speculation." Pachauri's IPCC uses the speculation and reports it as fact. With IPCC backing of the speculation, Pachauri seeks, and receives half a million dollars to set up a project to "study" the problem that Hasnain speculated into existence. And then Hasnain is hired by Pachauri to lead the project. How very convenient for both of them. This is the ethics of the man heading the IPCC.

And things may get very hot for Pachauri, not just because of the scandals brewing under his watch at the IPCC, but with TERI as well. The Times of India is reporting that TERI is being subjected to "due diligence" by the British Department of Internation Development. Apparently the British government had given 10 million pounds to TERI and now is questioning Pachuri who "enjoys a lavish lifestyle; his Delhi home is in the Golf Links area, the most expensive stretch of residetial real estate in India, and he is famous for his $1,000 suits." The more scrutiny the IPCC gets the more it stinks.

James Delingpole, at London Telegraph, put it this way:

So, to recap: in the course of a garbled phone conversation a scientist accidentally invents a problem that doesn’t exist. This gets reported as if gospel in an influential Warmist science magazine and repeated by a Warmist NGO, before being lent the full authority of the IPCC’s fourth assessment report which, as we know, can’t be wrong because it is vetted by around 2,500 scientists. Then, on the back of this untrue story, the scientist gets a cushy job at the institution whose director is also in charge of the IPCC.

If you want some idea of how TERI Europe, which Pachauri is a director of as well, is hiding revenue from scrutiny read this enlightening article also in the Telegraph. It is said that fish rots from the head down, I don't know if that is true, but it sure seems the IPCC does.

Photo: IPCC experts at work.

Here comes Nanny Pachauri

Rajendra Pachauri is described by the left-wing Guardian, in just one article, as a "climate expert," a "leading scientist" and "the world's leading climate scientist." Pachauri is the head bureaucrat at the body the world's politicians set up, via the UN, the Intergovernmental Panael on Climate Change.

But I wondered, is he really the "world's leading climate scientist?" I wondered if he's a climate scientist at all. He is educated but not in climatology or even meteorology. His education was in industrial engineering and economics. This doesn't mean he has no right to his political opinions and he has plenty of those on various ways that government must take control of your life to force you to do the right thing. I'll get to those shortly.

Pachauri jump into the global bureaucracy started small. He was a manager at the Deisel Locomotive Works. He went on to study industrial engineering and economics and taught economics. He continued teaching economics and became a research fellow at the World Bank. He was a board member of the International Solar Energy Society (which certainly has a financial stake in pushing warming theory) and involved in various energy associations. He is on the board of the National Thermal Power Corporation (another organization that would benefit financial from warming alarm). He was involved with various institutes and foundations. He is a busy man with fingers in many pies but what I can't find anywhere, is him being a climate scientist of any kind. His specialty is resource economics and industrial engineering. He has financial interests, or did, in industries that directly benefit by the policies the IPCC push (as does Al Gore.) But no credentials in climatology at all.

Yet the Guardian describes him as the top climate scientist in the world. Given my natural skepticism about the universe I guess that would make Pachauri the top climate scientist if the known universe. I find the double-standard of the alarmists quite amusing. Individuals with credentials in relevent fields, who are skeptics, are dismissed as "deniers" and in the pocket of Big Oil (whether they ever got a dime in any indirect way or not from oil companies. But a man, with no credentials in a related field to climatology, who has clearly had financial stakes in industries that are posed to gain from warming fear, is proclaimed by one of the leading left-wing papers in the world as the top climate scientist around.

Al Gore got convinced of apocalyptic environmentalism while appropriately studying theology. He too has stakes in alternative enegy businesses. He too is a career bureaucrat with an obvious political agenda. And the alarmist drool over him while dismissing skeptics who are far more credentialed than Mr. Gore. I am not saying that Gore and Pachauri have no right to hold their views or make them clear. I am merely pointing out how high the bar is for skeptics and how very low it is for the warming spokesmen.

Personally I have to give Pachauri some credit. He is quite open about how much Nanny Statism he wants in order to push his climate agenda. In the worshipful Guardian article they say that Pachauri wants to have hotel guests facing an electricity meter in their room and charged for all electricity they use, even though they already paid for the electricity when they paid to rent the room. He thinks "hefty aviation taxes" need to be imposed so that government can use the funds to subsidize trains and he thinks "ice water in restaurants should be curtailed." According to his worshippers at the Guardian this top climate bureaucrat says we "must undergo a radical value shift" to avoid the catastrophe, end-of-the-world, apocalypic warming.

Remember, he is not exactly arguing that people should be persuaded to change their values. He means that people should be forced to change their values through massive state control of things like their right to travel or even ice water in restaurants.

He said: "I don't see why you couldn't have a meter in the room to register your energy consumption from air-conditioning or heating and you should be charged for that. By bring about changes of this kind, you could really ensure people start becoming accountable for their actions." F.U. Pachauri. Come on, when you pay $100 to $150 a night for a hotel room you are being held accountable for the few cents worth of electricity you use. These would be mandatory charges, actually mandatory double-charging, for heating a hotel room. And it is "this kind" of change he advocates—coercive, financial burdens imposed on people to punish them and push them into using alternative energy, like those that Pachauri had financial interests in.

Pachauri says that there should be "a huge difference between the cost of flying and taking the train," he complained that "people were still making the 'irrational' choice to fly." And he suggested that "taxation should be used to discourage them."

Previously "the world's leading authority on global warming," Pachauri, said that, "People should have one meat-free day a week" and that "diet change was important" toward controlling warming. Hmmm, so should government raise taxes on foods that Pachauri finds unappealing and subsidize the foods he prefers? As you might suspect, Pachauri is a vegetarian so any taxes on meat won't bother him. Of course, while attacking flying he himself flys the world with a frequency that would make the average person's head spin. But as an elite member of the global bureaucracy he doesn't pay for that directly—you do. Pachauri, according to the article in the worshipful Guardian, had flown into London and would flying out to Copehagen to push for international controls to combat the end of the world.

According to his followers at the Guardian he "said that he also believed care use would have to be 'curbed': 'I think we can certainly sue pricing to regulate the use of private vehicles.'" Does he even drive his own private vehicle, or does he have drivers who chauffer him around? Of course, the taxes he wants to stop you from driving won't effect him, his charges will be paid for, like his air travel, by the people who pay the taxes.

Nanny Pachauri, of course, flys constantly, is chauffered around by drivers, and stays in only the top class hotels. All the changes he proposes to regulate flying, driving, and hotel stays, won't impact him simply because he is a bueacrat who doesn't pay his own way. He lives off the taxes you pay which ultimately fund his position as the "world's leading climate scientist."

I wonder what, in the Guardian's opinion, makes Pachauri the world leading climate scientist. It isn't his scientific credentials. Is it because he's a bureaucrat appointed by politicians to run a body of other bureacrats also controlled by politicians? Is it because he runs around the world, at taxpayer expense, proposing higher and higher taxes in order to control people and force them to act in certain ways? I personally suspect, from what I've seen, that one is "climate scientist" if you agree with the political agenda being pushed by the Left and you are not a "climate scientist," no matter your credentials, if you disagree with them.

Note: According to IPCC documents the taxpayers of the United States pay more into the IPCC bureaucracy than those of any other nation. I tried to locate how much salary Pachauri draws from the IPCC, but the budgets I read were very unclear. I did locate that the secretary who answers phones, deals with correspondence, etc., has a salary starting at $74,000. And the IPCC budget shows hundreds and hudreds of thousands being spent on hundreds of "journeys" but it unclear who is taking them and for what purposes.