The end is nigh - by Richard... Saturday, January 30, 2010

The end is nigh - by Richard... Saturday, January 30, 2010

Less than a week after he claimed the IPCC's credibility had increased as a result of its handling of the "Glaciergate" scandal, Pachauri's own personal credibility lies in tatters as The Timesaccuses him of a direct lie.

This is about when he first became aware of the false claim over the melting glaciers, Pachauri's version on 22 January being that he had only known about it "for a few days" – i.e., after it had appeared in The Sunday Times.

However, Ben Webster writes that a prominent science journalist, Pallava Bagla – who works for the Science journal (and NDTV as its science correspondent) - claims that last November he had informed Pachauri that Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University and a leading glaciologist, had dismissed the 2035 date as being wrong by at least 300 years. Pachauri had replied: "I don't have anything to add on glaciers."

Bagla interviewed Dr Pachauri again this week and asked him why he had decided to overlook the error before the Copenhagen summit. In the taped interview, he asked: "I pointed it out [the error] to you in several e-mails, several discussions, yet you decided to overlook it. Was that so that you did not want to destabilise what was happening in Copenhagen?"

Dr Pachauri replied: "Not at all, not at all. As it happens, we were all terribly preoccupied with a lot of events. We were working round the clock with several things that had to be done in Copenhagen. It was only when the story broke, I think in December, we decided to, well, early this month — as a matter of fact, I can give you the exact dates — early in January that we decided to go into it and we moved very fast."

According to Pachauri, "... within three or four days, we were able to come up with a clear and a very honest and objective assessment of what had happened. So I think this presumption on your part or on the part of any others is totally wrong. We are certainly never — and I can say this categorically — ever going to do anything other than what is truthful and what upholds the veracity of science."

Without even Bagla's input, we know this to be lies. Apart from anything else, there was the crisis meeting under the aegis of UNEP - which we reported on Thursday – which concluded that the 2035 claim "does not appear to be based upon any scientific studies and therefore has no foundation".

Separately, we have Syed Hasnain, while stressing that he was not involved in drafting the IPCC report, claiming that he noticed some of the mistakes when he first read the relevant section in 2008.

That was also the year he joined TERI in Delhi, headed by Dr Pachauri and he says he realised that the 2035 prediction was based on an interview he gave to the New Scientist magazine in 1999. But, he claims. he did not tell Dr Pachauri because he was not working for the IPCC and was busy with his own programmes at the time.

"I was keeping quiet as I was working here," he said. "My job is not to point out mistakes. And you know the might of the IPCC. What about all the other glaciologists around the world who did not speak out?"

However, Hasnain's assertions contrast rather sharply with a video interview given by him to NDTV (see clip above) on 9 November 2009 – the day that the Raina report on glaciers was published, challenging the claims made in the IPCC report. Then, he is seen to be defending the 2035 figure, and allowing himself to be styled as "author of the original IPCC report".

According to The Guardian, V K Raina, formerly deputy director general of the Geological Survey of India, has joined calls for Pachauri's resignation.

The Guardian cites India's Economic Times from over a week ago, which criticised the IPCC for damaging its own credibility, noting that "it would now seem that Mr Pachauri's steadfast unwillingness to consider an alternate position could well have given climate sceptics a stronger footing."

But today, the Deccan Herald also weighs in, declaring: "The [glacier] incident reflects poorly on the professionalism and scientific rigour of the IPCC and has done damage to its credibility." The writing is not so much on the wall as obliterating it.

Adding to the graffiti, in yet another development, the popular Indian magazine Open rips apart global warming, labelling it: "The Hottest Hoax in the World." Indian blogger Gurmeet in Liberty News Central thinks this could be the most hard-hitting article in the Indian MSM on AGW fraud ever.

Given what is about to descend upon him on Sunday, by the time the Indian media have absorbed the detail, Pachauri will be history.

PACHAURI THREAD

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The Great Glacier Show – Part II - by Richard... Friday, January 29, 2010

Continuing with the Pachauri-Hasnain "great glacier show", to which we introduced our avid readers yesterday, already we have seen significant developments which are set to make this a best selling saga.

In that first piece, we revealed that, to investigate fears of retreating glaciers in the Himalayas, raised largely by Syed Hasnain, the British government in 2001 funded a major field study code-named "Sagarmatha". We now learn that the sponsoring department, the Department For International Development (DFID), paid a cool (if you will forgive the use of that word) £315,277 of taxpayers' money for the work.

As we recall, that study, which reported in June 2004, found that the threat, that all of the region's glaciers may soon disappear, "would seem unfounded" and that "the catastrophic water shortages forecast by some experts are unlikely to happen for many decades, if at all." However, despite that, Syed Hasnain, continued to claim that the glaciers were shortly to disappear.

Not least, his claims appeared in the New Scientist on 8 May 2004, which stated thus:

THE great rivers of northern India and Pakistan will run strongly for the next 40 years and then die away, bringing flood followed by famine. That was the grim message last week from the first decade-by-decade forecast for the rivers that drain the huge glaciers of the Himalayas.

The problem is global warming, which has already increased glacier melting by up to 30 per cent. "But after 40 years, most of the glaciers will be wiped out and then we will have severe water problems," says Syed Iqbal Hasnain of Calicut University, Kerala, reporting the results of a three-year study by British, Indian and Nepalese researchers.

The study finds the biggest impact in Pakistan, where the Indus irrigates half the country's crops. Flows here could double before crashing to less than half current levels by the end of the century. But the declining flows predicted for the Ganges will also throw into disarray a vast Indian government scheme to avoid drought by diverting water from the country's glacier-fed northern rivers to the arid south.

What we now learn is that these wholly unsubstantiated claims were comprehensively rebutted by the lead scientist of the project, Gwyn Rees, in a letter to the New Scientiston 5 June 2004. Under the heading: "No floods, no famine," Rees wrote as follows:

As lead author of the report referred to in your article on glaciers in the Himalayas, I was shocked that the results of our three-year study could be so grossly misrepresented (8 May, p 7). As our report "An assessment of the potential impacts of deglaciation on the water resources of the Himalayas" concludes, the widespread perception that the region's glaciers will disappear within 40 years is ill-founded.

In many areas, water shortages are unlikely to happen for many decades - if at all. Some areas may benefit from increased water availability in the medium term. Catchments where glacial meltwater contributes significantly to the run-off, such as the upper Indus, appear to be most vulnerable to deglaciation. Eastern Himalayan catchments, benefiting from high summer monsoon precipitation, are less susceptible.

At no time did we suggest there would be a higher incidence of flooding, that famine would occur, or that an Indian government water-transfer scheme would be thrown "into disarray". The individual quoted in the article, though a member of our study team, clearly presented his personal view of the situation.

A clearer put-down of Hasnain's alarmism would be hard to find yet, as we record in our first piece, Hasnain continued making his baseless claims. And, in the next episode, we will see that he was still making the claims – or supporting them – into December 2009.

As it stands, therefore, the British government (i.e., British taxpayers) shelled out £315,277 to disprove Hasnain's claims. But, when WG II of the IPCC came to consider the issue of melting glaciers – funded by British taxpayers to the tune of £1,436,162 – it ignored the Sagarmatha report (which had also been written up in a per-reviewed journal) and went with Hasnain's not only baseless but also discredited claim.

The background to this, and subsequent developments, are now the subject of an ongoing investigation by The Sunday Times, the results of which will be published this weekend.

PACHAURI THREAD

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This is where our money goes - by Richard...

One of the abiding mysteries of our time is how the "climate groupies" manage to field their supporters in such large numbers at the succession of climate summits held throughout the world.

Well, part of the puzzle is solved, at least in respect of the Johannasburg Earth Summit in 2002. The British taxpayer, via the Department For International Development (DFID), spent £200,000:

To support preparatory activities, in particular at the national and regional levels, in a co-ordinated and reinforcing way, and to support the participation of major groups from DCs (developing countries) in regional and participatory processes and in the Rio event itself.

We also spent £120,000 on "Project Earth Summit 2002" to "create a multi-stakeholder movement around the world that will be preparing for Earth Summit 2002."

Not content with that, we also managed to dosh out on a "Workshop on Women as 'Sacred Custodians' of the Earth" to "explore the spiritual, religious and philosophical views concerning women and ecology and the policy implications of these belief systems." There is some small consolation, I suppose, that we only paid £10,000 for that little junket.

However, that pales into insignificance when compared with the amount of money we spent on "support for developing country participation at important international conferences, negotiations and seminars" – most of them, presumably, on climate change. That was an eye-watering £1,500,000, all at the taxpayers' expense.

You know, there are some people out there who think our development budget is spent on alleviating poverty and other such "good works". If they really knew how the money was spent, they would be sick to their stomachs. And this, incidentally, is the budget that David Cameron wants to ring-fence.

CLIMATE CHANGE – NEW THREAD

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Bin Laden to chair IPCC? - by Richard...

Joining president Obama, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and, of course, the EU, R K Pachauri, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all, warning of the dangers of climate change, is that star of stage and screen ... bring on the one and only Osama bin Laden.

In his latest video to the world, he has made a plea for "drastic solutions" to global warming, and "not solutions that partially reduce the effect of climate change."

He blames Western industrialised nations for hunger, desertification and floods across the globe and, needless to say, the al Qaida leader has called for the world to boycott US goods, blaming industrialised countries for global warming, saying the way to stop it was to bring "the wheels of the American economy" to a halt.

In that, at least, Obama is ahead of the game, and needs no advice from Bin Liner. With the help of the IPCC and Dr R K Pachauri, he is well advanced in his plans totally to destroy the US economy, alongside his Western allies such as Gordon Brown, who are doing their best to destroy their own.

Soon enough, we can expect an outbreak of world peace as the Western leaders stand proud amid the wreckage of the economies they have so willingly destroyed.

Meanwhile, while Bin Liner will emerge from his hiding place to be elected by acclamation as the new chairman of the IPCC, ready to take the cue from the WWF advertisement (pictured above - the caption reads: "The Tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11") and launch a new fleet of airliners on New York to complete the work of destruction.

CLIMATE CHANGE – NEW THREAD

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About right - by Richard...

Englishman's Castle makes the obvious but necessary point about the Chilcot inquiry and the Blair extravaganza today. Briefly, I once thought that the inquiry was important - I was wrong, and should have stuck to my earlier analysis.

Blair, as we saw from the days when he was prime minister, is past master at constructing a superficially profound speech which, on detailed analysis, contains absolutely nothing. To précis one of his speeches is like letting the air out of a balloon – you have nothing left but a wrinkled piece of rubber.

Thus, today is just entertainment for the political classes who, having retreated from politics, have nothing better to do with their time. And, needless to say, the media will be in full flow, chasing after hot air in a self-indulgent orgy of navel-gazing.

Meanwhile, outside the politico-media bubble, the real world goes on.

COMMENT THREAD

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Denial more dangerous than abortion - by Richard...

A recent attempt to show the Gore antidote, Not Evil Just Wrong in Colony High School in Wasilla, home town of Sarah Palin, met with some unexpected opposition.

Although al-Gore's An Inconvenient Truth had been shown many times, the school authorities insisted that any student who wanted to see the antidote had to have a permission slip from their parents.

To put this in perspective, not only was no such condition in place before screening An Inconvenient Truth, in Alaska, the State can arrange an abortion for a student without notifying their parents.

Nice to see that the authorities have their priorities right.