Repeating its mistakes - by Richard... Thursday, February 04, 2010

Repeating its mistakes - by Richard... Thursday, February 04, 2010

Pachauri is looking even more shaky, according to Ben Webster in The Times, as his allies peel away.

The latest is John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK, who wants Pachauri replaced. He says of the Himalayan glaciers that the good doctor should have acted as soon as he had been informed of the "error", even though issuing a correction would have embarrassed the IPCC on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit.

"Mistakes will always be made," says Sauven, "but it's how you handle those mistakes which affects the credibility of the institution. Pachauri should have put his hand up and said 'we made a mistake'. It's in these situations that your character and judgment is tested. Do you make the right judgment call? He clearly didn't."

Pachauri is the man, of course, who when first confronted with doubts as to the glacier claim, dismissed their author as indulging in "voodoo science", refusing even to countenance error. And now, under the tutelage of its master, the IPCC is repeating the mistake. 

In a press release issued yesterday, it gave a no compromise response to the latest gaffes to be detected. It writes:

Recent media interest has drawn attention to two so-called errors in the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the IPCC, the first dealing with losses from disasters and the second on the subject of Amazon forests. The leadership of the IPCC has looked into both these instances and concluded that the challenges are without foundations. 

In neither case, did we find any basis for making changes in the wording of the report. We are convinced that there has been no error on those issues on the part of the IPCC. We released a statement about the disaster issue. As far as the second subject dealing with the Amazon is concerned, again, the IPCC has valid reasons for publishing the text as it stands in the report.

In response to these baseless charges, we have decided to provide details on the manner in which the IPCC has implemented its principles and procedures. These are the foundations that provide assurance on the validity and accuracy of statements made in the AR4.

Those "details" are here, an amalgam of complacency, insufferable arrogance and wishful thinking, demonstrating that the organisation has learned nothing from its "Glaciergate" experience. Such is its inability to read the mood, it seems set to conspire in its own downfall.

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

Print ready

A well-financed and vicious plot - by Richard... Wednesday, February 03, 2010

"For the first time, Indians are experiencing an organised, systematic and vicious attack by powerful and well-funded lobbies in the developed world. 

These lobbies are aiming to diminish the perception of the impact of global warming and climate change on our common future, and the consequent need to change our lifestyle. Such lifestyle changes will damage the future of many industries, so there are vast resources and stakes in continuing present consumption styles."

That is the considered view of S L Rao, a visiting fellow at Dr Pachauri's Teri and former director general of National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER), writing in the Indian Business Standard under the headline: "Behind the attacks on Pachauri".

Pachauri himself is just as bad, if less explicit, reported in The Financial Times as declining to name anyone behind the concerted attack on the IPCC (and himself), saying it was probably backed by powerful corporate interests determined to thwart concerted action against global warming.

There I am then, sitting in the back room of a house that is not even worth as much as Dr Pachauri's back yard, deep in an obscure suburb of unfashionable Bradford, 200 miles north of London, fending off the bailiffs only with the help of our generous readers and the occasional commission for a newspaper – bashing away at a £300-laptop, so worn that the lettering on some of the keys is now invisible.

And now, variously, my little free-lance effort has become part of "an organised, systematic and vicious attack by powerful and well-funded lobbies in the developed world" backed by "powerful corporate interests determined to thwart concerted action against global warming" (probably).

I wish.

But, according to S L Rao, the anti-climate change lobby has, after Copenhagen, mounted such an attack on R K Pachauri, and thus on the credibility of the IPCC and its reports on climate change. It started with vicious personal attacks on Pachauri’s earnings from his counselling of various organisations around the world.

When they discovered that Pachauri gave all payments made to him in connection with such work to Teri, says Rao, they charged him with using his position to help fund Teri. They then found a serious mistake in the findings in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report relating to the melting of Himalayan glaciers, and used this mistake to condemn the idea of climate change itself!

In the case of Himalayan glaciers, by focusing on an overstated conclusion of obviously incompetent "assessment", the anti-climate change lobby is trying to deny climate change as a whole. With its personal attack on the chief of the IPCC, it is trying to discredit his values and principles to claim that IPCC's reports are biased for his personal financial benefit and that of his organisation, thus discrediting all IPCC's laborious work in four reports over many years.

By further extending the attack to Teri, the lobby is trying to discredit the work of a unique Indian interdisciplinary research-cum-action organisation, and attack its funding sources — a vulnerable point of any research organisation. 

We, in India, warns S L Rao, "must be aware of this well-financed and vicious plot by international agencies."

While the IPCC and all research organisations must be ever vigilant in terms of the quality of people it employs, the quality of supervision, and review, the work of two Indian "glaciologists" must not be allowed to bring disrepute to Indian science. But, we can be certain that the anti-climate change lobby will persist in trying to discredit IPCC's work, its president and others in the organisation.

These people just can't cope with the idea that they've been blagged by an unpaid blogger on the other side of the world, reaching out through the power of the internet, one of many other bloggers who have taken on the might of the warmists and have given them – and all their billions in funding – a run for their money.

Roger Harrabin of the BBC half gets it, noting that "the web is the home of right-wing bloggers who campaign politically against the IPCC." But, for all its frequent vitriol and false accusations, he writes, "the blogosphere has been proven at least partially right on occasions. Any future iteration of the IPCC, he says, will have to find a way of taking the serious bloggers seriously."

The trouble is they don't understand bloggers, don't understand how they derive their power and, most of all, cannot conceive that a few dedicated people, motivated entirely by principle, can use the medium blogging affords and run circles round them. 

In their narrow, corporate world, slaves to their paymasters and their vested interests, they can only see the world through the prism of their own experiences. And, like S L Rao, they get it hopelessly and laughably wrong. That is why we're going to beat them. The "monster" always has a blind spot – and we've found it.

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

Print ready

Carnegie suspended Pachauri grant - by Richard...

Despite Dr Pachauri's claims that his research institution TERI was being funded from a grant of $500,000 from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the money from one of America's leading and oldest charities had already been suspended by the time he announced the grant.

The announcement of the funding was made jointly at a prestigious press conference by Pachauri and the president of Iceland, Dr Ólafur Grímsson on 15 January of this year.

On the day, the TERI press release claimed that, "according to predictions of scientific merit they [the glaciers] may indeed melt away in several decades. This, in turn, will have implications for the entire water system of the sub-continent, with immediate effect on soil, water management, and the possibilities of food production."

"Looking at the unfolding scenario in the mountains and the immediate need for scientific collaboration and research on this issue," the release continued, "[the] University of Iceland in collaboration with The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) and the Carnegie Corporation of New York have joined hands to work in the fields of glaciology and soil science."

Although the release claimed that the collaboration, "will be funded primarily by the Carnegie Corporation of New York", the celebrations were a sham as, according to the Indian DNA news agency, no money had been given to either TERI or Grímsson's Global Centre.

This is confirmed by Susan King, vice president for public affairs at the corporation. "In September 2008, we approved a $500,000 grant to the Iceland -based Global Centre towards research on water-related security and humanitarian challenges to South Asia posed by the melting Himalayan glaciers. It was a one-time grant," she said.

"No funds have been paid to the centre as the grantee (the centre) told us not to send it because of political and economic challenges facing Iceland," she added.

No timescale is given by King, but from a separate e-mail sent to us from Carnegie official George Soule, we learn that the grant was suspended shortly after it had been approved, i.e., well before TERI's January launch. The Corporation has not answered queries about whether the grant will be reinstated.

The DNA agency notes that, "Clearly, the US charity's money hasn't been squandered on a Himalayan blunder." King declined to comment, or get dragged into the climate row, the agency says, but did the centre and Carnegie smell a rat? The grant never happened despite being approved in September 2008.

It's terribly odd for a receiver of a grant to turn down generous funding "unless, of course, the centre felt the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 was far-fetched," the agency concludes.

However, there is more. On Sunday, we noted that an emergency workshop of glacier experts had been convened on 28 December by UNEP, the sponsoring organisation for the IPCC – specifically to discuss the melting glacier claim.

Then, the considered response was that the claim was unsupported by science and that the IPCC conclusion "may have to be revised". Yet Dr Pachauri, head of the IPCC – who must have known of the conclusion – did nothing until 20 January, three days after it had been raised by The Sunday Times and five days after his TERI press launch.

Had the controversy broken earlier, it would clearly have been embarrassing to Drs Pachauri and Grímsson but was there a more sinister motive? With the Carnegie funds having been suspended, was Pachauri keeping quiet in order to avoid the very controversy he feared might happen – knowing that a major press row might end any chances of reinstatement?

Do we have a cover-up here?

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

Print ready

The latest exaggeration - by Richard...

Steve McIntyre over at Climate Auditpicks up the latest exaggeration in the IPCC report, via the Dutch newspaperVrij Nederland.

This is to be found in Chapter 12 of the WGII report, where it tells us:

The Netherlands is an example of a country highly susceptible to both sea-level rise and river flooding because 55% of its territory is below sea level where 60% of its population lives and 65% of its Gross National Product (GNP) is produced.

In fact, as the newspaper tells us, these figures are far too high. The Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) states that only one fifth of the Netherlands is below sea level and that only 19 percent rather than 65 percent of the GDP generated is generated in that area.

Steve observes that even 20 percent is not something that can be ignored, but the percentage below sea level is the sort of thing that primary school geography classes should be able to get right.

There is more to it than that, though. As the evidence builds, it is possible to say that this is more than sloppy work or a few "mistakes". As with the temperatures claimed to prove global warming, every "error" points in one direction, exaggerating the impacts of climate change.

Thus, while glaciers may or may not be melting, if you accept that they are, then the 2035 figure is a gross exaggeration. A portion of the Amazon rain forest may be at risk from climate change – specifically reduced rainfall – but both the figure of 40 percent and the suggestion that the forests are susceptible to slight reductions in precipitation are gross exaggerations.

That seems to be the underlying modus operandi of the IPCC – serial, structured exaggeration in order to build its case. How many more examples do we need before they stop talking about "mistakes" and admit to deliberate fraud?