The credibility of the climate change report which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace prize with Al Gore is melting more rapidly than the Himalayan glaciers it claimed would disappear by 2035.
Just days after revelations that the glacier-melt story actually rested on a “speculative” 1999 remark by an obscure Indian scientist, an editor admitted that he knew before the prize-winning report went to press that no one had verified one of the most compelling claims made by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Prof. Murari Lal told the Daily Mail that the alarming, but unsubstantiated, claim, got included for political purposes: “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action,” he told the British paper.
Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton in a phone interview from San Francisco Monday, told The Daily Caller: “It would be surprising if the IPCC were not political.”
“Every piece of the United Nations system is highly politicized,” Bolton said, adding that “Those who have overstated on climate change have done themselves a grave disservice.”
Bolton, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, predicted Congress would not move forward on carbon emissions legislation without demanding verification of climate change data.
“After the election in Massachusetts,” he said, referring to Republican Senator-elect Scott Brown’s victory, “there’s very little chance you’ll see cap and trade pass this year.”
Accuweather meteorologist Joe Bastardi recalled Claude Raines’s line from Casablanca: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”
“This stuff is well-known” in the realm of weather and climate science, said Bastardi, an expert senior Accuweather forecaster. He adds that the field of climate study includes “plenty of doubt,” and he referred to the IPCC glacier-melt claims as “fraud”.
Bastardi’s State College, Pa., neighbor, meteorology Prof. Michael Mann — currently target of a Penn State ‘climategate’ probe — should “get off his high horse, and come down and debate the issue,” he said.
Mann is a “brilliant scholar who shouldn’t be judged by his weakest moment,” Bastardi added. “When you’re absolutely convinced you’re right, you refuse to see things objectively.” He suggested proponents of man-made global warming theories should not shrink, as they have, from openly debating colleagues who hold differing views.
Raj Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, admitted errors may have been made in a report once touted as the most reliable, peer-reviewed study on the subject, but declined to say what action he would take.
However, the allegations now go beyond unscientific incompetence and cover-up, to possible corruption.
The UK Telegraph reports that the man whose baseless 1999 speculation received the imprimatur of the United Nations, the World Wildlife Fund, the Nobel Committee and Al Gore — has for two years drawn a paycheck from Pachauri’s own Dehli-based firm, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). Further, the glacier-melt claim helped TERI win part of a $500,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation, as well as a chunk of a $4.2 million research study funded by the EU.
So, perhaps it comes as no surprise that when India’s leading glaciologist published a report in November stating that the rate of Himalayan glacier retreat has not increased in 50 years, IPCC Chairman Pachauri called it ‘voodoo science.’ Two months later, the IPCC was forced to retract its own claim of high-speed melting.
Another section of the IPCC report, one that linked man-made global warming to extreme weather events, also appears to have been based on an unpublished, non-peer-reviewed paper. When the paper was later published in 2008, it included this warning: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.”
Despite the lack of empirical data, the IPCC did not amend its report before the world climate change summit in Copenhagen in December. Keep in mind that the Copenhagen gathering considered creating a new global governance unit, and transferring hundreds of billions of dollars from advanced nations, like the U.S., to developing nations purportedly threatened by these weather phenomena.
The summit virtually collapsed due to the climategate e-mail scandal that unmasked high-level research misconduct, efforts to hide contrary data and attempts to silence scientists who buck global warming orthodoxy.
Calls for Pachauri’s resignation from the IPCC have sparked no action. Calls for Penn State to open its probe of Mann to external scrutiny have produced similar results.
