National Post, January 19, 2010

Now the question is whether Rajendra Pachauri should resign

By Peter Foster

T

he Himalayan glaciers will still be around in 2035, contrary to oft-repeated alarmist claims by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Whether the IPCC’s head, Rajendra Pachauri, whose credibility is melting faster than the proverbial snowball in Hades, will make it to his next paycheque is another matter.

With Climategate still simmering and the collapse of Copenhagen  reverberating, a fresh storm has blown up over the discovery that the IPCC’s claim that Himalayan glaciers were about to disappear is entirely bogus.

“If the present rate [of melting] continues,” said the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report in 2007, “the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high.”

There was no significant questioning of this claim until late last year, when the Indian government published a discussion paper that pointed out that there was in fact no sign of any “abnormal” retreat in the Himalayan glaciers. India’s environment minister Jairam Ramesh accused the IPCC of being “alarmist.”

Doing what he has traditionally done in such circumstances, Mr. Pachauri proceeded to smear the messengers and pontificate about the IPCC’s high “peer-reviewed” scientific standards. He denounced the research paper as “voodoo science.” He accused Minister Ramesh of “arrogance.” He said that such skeptical claims were reminiscent of “climate change deniers.”

However, Dr. Pachauri’s nemesis turned out to be a Canadian, Professor Graham Cogley of Trent University, who is himself an IPCC author and no skeptic. Professor Cogley says he was unaware of the IPCC’s Himalayan projection until he came across it last year. He immediately realized that the 2035 date was wildly improbable and set about tracking down its origins.

The source for the 2035 figure given by the IPCC was a World Wildlife Fund campaign pamphlet, which in turn took the date from a story that appeared in the British magazine New Scientist in 1999. That story had quoted a prediction by an Indian climate scientist, Syed Hasnain, that all the glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas could disappear by 2035, a claim with absolutely no basis in research, and which got mixed up with a 1996 projection by a Russian scientist that  all the world’s glaciers might disappear by 2350.

By the steps just noted, however, the claim flew straight into the 2007 IPCC report, by which time it wasn’t just the central and eastern glaciers of the Himalayas that were projected to disappear, but all of them. Moreover, the IPCC claimed that this prediction had a likelihood greater than 90%.

When the source of the projection was revealed, including in a story in the most recent U.K. Sunday Times, Mr. Pachauri was forced to climb off his high horse. However, the lead author of the relevant IPCC chapter, Murari Lal, rejected the notion that the IPCC had screwed up. “The IPCC authors did exactly what was expected from them,” he said.

Never were truer words spoken. The IPCC’s task has always been not objectively to examine science but to make the case for man-made climate change by any means available.

Exhibiting stunning chutzpah, Dr. Hasnain — the man who made the original prediction — stated righteously that, “It is not proper for IPCC to include references from popular magazines or newspapers.” Strangely, however, Dr. Hasnain hadn’t been trying to distance himself from his own wild speculation as recently as last September, when he was quoted in a story in The Globe and Mail as a person “who believes the Himalayas may be denuded of all snow and ice in as little as 20 years.”

Perhaps that might have had something to do with the fact that, after his alarmist speculations proved so useful for the IPCC’s case, he was hired by The Energy Research Institute, TERI, whose director just happens to be IPCC head Dr. Pachauri! Alarm over the prospects for the Himalayas — which was rooted in the IPCC’s 2007 report — made it easier for Dr. Pachauri’s institute to raise funds. As the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr. noted this week, “[T]his stinks … what we have here is a classic and unambiguous case of financial conflict of interest.”

True Believers were quick to attempt to pin this, er, misunderstanding on those Big Oil ideologues. Bob Ward of the U.K.’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change told The Guardian, “It is only a matter of time before the lobbyists who peddle climate change denial for their own political ends start to overstate the significance of this episode, and try to link it to the controversy surrounding the email messages hacked from the University of East Anglia.”

Thanks for saving us the trouble Bob!

Meanwhile other IPCC scientists were beginning to break ranks. Georg Kaser, an Austrian glaciologist and IPCC contributor, told Agence France Presse this week that he had notified his IPCC colleagues of the “huge” Himalayan mistake late in 2006. “This number is not just a little bit wrong,” he said, “It is as wrong as can be wrong… It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing.”

Significantly, however, Mr. Kaser had blown no more public whistles. Moreover, he went on to reject “IPCC bashing” even though he admitted that the process had, in this case, “entirely failed.”

As for Professor Cogley, the Canadian who more recently spotted the “egregious” error, he told me that the claim about Himalayan glaciers melting represents a 300-word section of a report thousands of pages long, and pointed out that was the only such error that had been drawn to his attention.

Nevertheless, that error has been regurgitated ad nauseam. Although Professor Cogley did not notice it, when the 2007 IPCC report was published, the 2035 date was dutifully reported by newspapers all over the world, and became the subject of much Jeffrey Simpson-style brow-knitting.

The vast climate change industry of politicians, bureaucrats and radical NGOs was already reeling from the revelations of Climategate and the failure of Copenhagen. However, the finagling at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia is complex enough for the industry to have mounted a rearguard action of confusion in the hopes of burying the issue. This latest revelation is much easier to understand. It provides incontrovertible evidence that the IPCC’s scientific standards are not only shoddy, but strongly biased towards extreme alarmism.

Mr. Pachauri has already come under intense criticism not only for his own arrogance but for multiple conflicts of interest (which admittedly hardly makes him unusual in a policy strata that also contains Al Gore and Maurice Strong). Now the issue is whether he will be thrown under the climate juggernaut in order to keep the policy charade going.

Even New Scientist, which printed the story on which this inverse pyramid of alarm was built, and which has traditionally been in the True Believing mainstream media camp, is demanding answers on how pure speculation could become an IPCC “finding,” which was then so vigorously defended by Dr. Pachauri.

This is not just a minor matter that needs a little clearing up. It is further evidence that the entire IPCC process has been corrupt from the start.