UN climate chief Rajendra Pachauri ‘got grants through bogus claims’
Posted by Dan McGrath in Corruption, Junk Science, Raj Pachauri
By Jonathan Leake
The chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Rajendra Pachauri’s Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion’s share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers.
It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus. The revelation comes just a week after The Sunday Times highlighted serious scientific flaws in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on the likely impacts of global warming.
The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 – an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report.
Since then, however, The Sunday Times has discovered that the same bogus claim has been cited in grant applications for TERI.
One of them, announced earlier this month just before the scandal broke, resulted in a £310,000 grant from Carnegie.
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“The chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.”
This mistake in the 986 page second volume of the Assessment Report is one of only a handful that people have found in the report since its publication in 2007. Another mistake was to assert that half of the Netherlands is below sea level; in fact, it’s something like 27%. The other mistakes are similar: regrettable in a publication on which the world relies for information about climate change, but hardly things to make one lose confidence in the report.
The annual assessment report was of course wrong to incorporate a claim in a non-peer reviewed article — that the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035. But the claim that the Himalayan glaciers are melting is not bogus. It’s happening. And the irony of this controversy is that the non-peer reviewed estimate may turn out to be right. The one way that computer models have commonly called things wrong has been to underestimate, not overestimate, the rate at which the polar ice cap and various glaciers would melt. So, let’s all make a pact to quit smoking and lose weight so that we can last until 2035 and see for ourselves whether the Himalayas have become bare rock.