IPCC guru was a student when writing 'authoritative' reports

FROM-American Thinker

Thomas Lifson

 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose reports have motivated governmental action to cut carbon emissions, relied on an uncredentialed student named Sari Kovats for writing and supervising its supposedly authoritative reports.  Donna Laframboise of NOconsensus.org brings us the shocking news.

In 1994, Kovats was one of only 21 people in the entire world selected to work on the first IPCC chapter that examined how climate change might affect human health. She was 25 years old. Her first academic paper wouldn't be published for another three years. It would be six years before she'd even begin her doctoral studies and 16 years before she'd graduate.

IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri says this about how IPCC authors are selected:

There is a very careful process of selection...These are people who have been chosen on the basis of their track record, on their record of publications, on the research that they have done...They are people who are at the top of their profession as far as research is concerned in a particular aspect of climate change...you can't think of a better set of qualified people than what we have in the IPCC.  [bold added]

Academically speaking, Kovats was invisible back in 1994. That anyone connected to the IPCC could have considered her a scientific expert is astonishing.

I'm sorry to say that that was just the beginning. When it came time to write the next version of the climate bible, Kovats received a promotion. She was selected to be a lead author, again for the health chapter - despite the fact that her doctoral studies wouldn't begin until the year the IPCC report was published.

What do we suppose happened with the next edition of the climate bible - the one that appeared in 2007, still three full years before Kovats earned her doctorate? Was she selected once again to be a health chapter lead author? You betcha.

But by then the IPCC, in its wisdom, had decided she was a scientific expert in other areas, as well. Kovats served as a contributing author for three additional chapters in Working Group 2: 

• Chapter 1 - Assessment of Observed Changes and Responses in Natural and Managed Systems
• Chapter 6 - Coastal Systems and Low-lying Areas
• Chapter 12 - Europe

She was also an IPCC expert reviewer.

So how does a neophyte suddenly beome the "top of [her] profession"? The great Andrew Bolt, of the Courier Mail/Herald Sun in Australia has a good answer:

Maybe she just has the right opinions.

OF COURSE-It's all in the marketing

FROM-The Times of India

IPCC looking for communications manager to tackle crisis situation

WASHINGTON: Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is reportedly looking for its first Communications and Media Relations Programme Manager to help it avoid a mismanaged situation like last year, when it was stated that "most Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035."

The IPCC, which was honoured with the 2007 Nobel peace prize for its work, had a lot of explaining to do after journalists last year exposed errors in its 2007 assessment report.

IPCC officials have also admitted that the group's crisis management was as bad as the now-infamous statement that most Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 (see 'Glacier estimate is on thin ice'). At the time, the IPCC reportedly had no full-time professional communications director who could have dealt with the matter instantly.

The paper quoted Nick Nuttall, spokesperson and head of media with the United Nations Environment Programme that set up the IPCC in 1988 jointly with the World Meteorological Organization, as saying that in a world of rapid communication, "you cannot move at the speed of the slowest."

"The glacier affair didn't need to become the feeding frenzy for the international media that it did, he says. In scientific circles it had been known for months that something was badly wrong with the glacier claim. A skilled public-relations manager with a good network of relevant scientists could have nipped the problem in the bud before it burst on the scene, rather than having journalists claim a scoop," Nuttall added.

The IPCC was later criticised for its claim that 'most Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035' by many scientists who said that the claim was based on a decade-old interview of one climate scientist in a science magazine, The New Scientist, and that hard scientific evidence to support that figure was lacking.

The Cancun Climate Capers

FROM-American Thinker


By S. Fred Singer


Today, Nov. 29, marks the beginning of the Cancun COP (Conference of the Parties [to the Kyoto Protocol]). This is the 16th meeting of the nearly 200 national delegations, which have been convening annually since the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997 at COP-3.


This conference promises to be another two-week extravaganza for some 20,000 delegates and hangers-on, who will be enjoying the sand, surf, and tequila-sours -- mostly paid for by taxpayers from the US and Western Europe. For most delegates, this annual vacation has become a lifetime career: it pays for mortgages and their children's education. I suppose a few of them actually believe that they are saving the earth -- even though the Kyoto Protocol [to limit emission of greenhouse (GH) gases, like CO2, but never submitted for ratification to the US Senate] will be defunct in 2012 and there is -- thankfully -- no sign of any successor treaty.

But never fear: the organizers may ‘pull a rabbit out of a hat' and spring a surprise on the world. They will likely announce that they have conquered the greenhouse gas hydrofluorocarbon (HFC). Now, HFCs are what replaced HCFCs, which in turn replaced CFCs, thanks to the Montreal Protocol of 1987. This succession of chemical refrigerants has reduced ozone-destroying potential; but unfortunately they are all GH gases. So now HFCs must be eradicated, because a single molecule of HFC produces many thousand times the greenhouse effect of a molecule of CO2. What they don't tell you, of course, is that the total forcing from the HFCs is less than one percent of that of CO2, according to the IPCC [see page 141]. So ‘slaying the dragon' amounts to slaying a mouse -- or something even smaller. But you can bet that it will be trumpeted as a tremendous achievement and will likely invigorate the search for other mice that can be slain.

"No one was available to respond at the IPCC..."

UN climate change claims on rainforests were wrong, study suggests


The United Nations' climate change panel is facing fresh criticism after new research contradicted the organisation's claims about the devastating effect climate change could have on the Amazon rainforest.

FROM-UK TELEGRAPH


A new study, funded by Nasa, has found that the most serious drought in the Amazon for more than a century had little impact on the rainforest's vegetation.

The findings appear to disprove claims by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could react drastically to even a small reduction in rainfall and could see the trees replaced by tropical grassland.

The IPCC has already faced intense criticism for using a report by environmental lobby group WWF as the basis for its claim, which in turn had failed to cite the original source of the research.

Scientists have now spoken out against the 40% figure contained in the IPCC report and say that recent research is suggesting that the rainforest may be more resilient to climate change than had been previously thought.

It comes just days after the UN announced an independent review into the panel's procedures following a series of scandals over its most recent report which was found to contain factual errors and claims which were not based on rigorous scientific research.

The InterAcademy Council, which is the umbrella organisation for the national academies of science around the world, will examine how the IPCC's reports are compiled and communicated.

Dr Jose Marengo, a climate scientist with the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research and a member of the IPCC, said the latest study on the Amazon's response to drought highlighted the errors in the previous claims.

He said: "The way the WWF report calculated this 40% was totally wrong, while (the new) calculations are by far more reliable and correct."

The new study, conducted by researchers at Boston University and published in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters, used satellite data of the Amazon rainforest to study the effects of a major drought in 2005 when rainfall fell to the lowest level in living memory.

The drought saw rivers and lakes dry up, causing towns and cities that rely upon water flowing out of the rainforest to suffer severe water shortages.

But the researchers found no major changes in the levels of vegetation and greenery in the forests despite the drought.

They claim this contradicts the statements made in the IPCC's 2007 assessment report on climate change.

It said: "Up to 40 % of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state.

"It is more probably that forests will be replaced by ecosystems that have more resistance to multiple stresses caused by temperature increase, droughts and fires, such as tropical savannahs."

Professor Ranga Myneni, from the climate and vegitation research group at Boston University who was the senior researcher in the study, said criticised the IPCC’s claim that a “even a slight reduction in precipitation” would cause drastic changes in the rainforest.

He said: “There was more than a slight reduction in precipitation during the drought of 2005. It is that particular claim of the IPCC that our analysis rejects.”

Sangram Ganguly, a scientist from the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute in California and one of the researchers who conducted the new study, said: "Our results certainly do not indicate such extreme sensitivity to reductions in rainfall."

Dr Arindam Samanta, the lead author of the study, said: "We found no big differences in the greenness levels of these forests between drought and non-drought years, which suggests that these forests may be more tolerant of droughts than we previously thought."

The IPCC has been left embarrassed after it emerged the panel had quoted unsubstantiated and erroneous claims about the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas and had also used information from student dissertations and magazine articles to compile its report.

The chair of the panel, Rajendra Pachauri has come under mounting pressure to resign following the scandal and questions over his ability to lead the organisation.

Dr Keith Allott, head of climate change at WWF UK, said: "The WWF report from 2000 on the threat of wildfires in Amazon was based on respected sources and peer-reviewed literature available at the time.

"Subsequent peer-reviewed literature has confirmed that the Amazon faces serious risks from climate change. This new study is a welcome addition to the growing body of evidence."

Dr Simon Lewis, an expert on forest die back at Leeds University and a research fellow at the Royal Society, said the Boston University study had helped to clear up debate about how the rainforest responded to short-term drought.

But he added that long-term reductions in rainfall might have a very different impact.

No one was available to respond at the IPCC yesterday.


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One Flew over.....The Sequel

UN to review errors made by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

FROM-The Times

The United Nations is to announce an independent review of errors made by its climate change advisory body in an attempt to restore its credibility.

A team of the world’s leading scientists will investigate the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and ask why its supposedly rigorous procedures failed to detect at least three serious overstatements of the risk from global warming.

The review will be overseen by the InterAcademy Council, whose members are drawn from the world’s leading national science academies, including Britain’s Royal Society, the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The review will be led by Robbert Dijkgraaf, co-chairman of the Interacademy Council and president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He has been asked to investigate the internal processes of the IPCC and will not consider the overarching question of whether it was right to claim that human activities were very likely to be causing global warming.

The review, which will be announced in New York by Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General, and Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, is expected to recommend stricter checking of sources and much more careful wording to reflect the uncertainties in many areas of climate science.

The IPCC’s most glaring error was a claim that all Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Most glaciologists believe it would take another 300 years for the glaciers to melt at the present rate.

It also claimed that global warming could cut rain-fed North African crop production by up to 50 per cent by 2020. A senior IPCC contributor has since admitted that there is no evidence to support this claim.

The Dutch Government has asked the IPCC to correct its claim that more than half the Netherlands is below sea level. The environment ministry said that only 26 per cent of the country was below sea level.

The allegations about climate scientists are believed to have contributed to a sharp rise in public scepticism about climate change. Last month an opinion poll found that the proportion of the population that believes climate change is an established fact and largely man-made has fallen from 41 per cent in November to 26 per cent.

The Met Office, which produces the global temperature record used by the IPCC in its reports, has proposed a separate review of its data after admitting that public confidence in its findings had been undermined.

The Met Office relies on analysis by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which is under investigation over allegations that its director manipulated raw data and tried to hide it from critics.




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Raj the new Sexy Sadie?

Well he did have that steamy novel

Rajendra Pachauri: Media went gaga over greenhouse-gas guru

FROM-NJ Star Ledger

By Paul Mulshine/The Star Ledger

At the height of the ’60s silliness, the Beatles flew off to India to seek enlightenment at the feet of a guru named the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Their enchantment didn’t last. After they noticed that this master of the metaphysical had managed to acquire his own helicopter to ferry him around the foothills of the Himalayas, the Beatles bolted. As John Lennon was headed to the airport, he penned a parody titled “Sexy Sadie” about a temptress who “made a fool of everyone.”

Too bad Lennon’s not around to write a song about the latest guru to emerge out of India, Rajendra Pachauri. Pachauri is a railway engineer by training, yet somehow he managed to work his way up to the chairmanship of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

That’s the group of global-warming alarmists that was recently forced to retract a prediction that the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035. It turns out the claim had no more basis than the Maharishi’s claim that his followers could levitate.

The London Daily Telegraph reported the other day that a United Nations committee will shortly be announcing that an independent panel will investigate the IPCC’s role in what has come to be known as “Climategate.” (See the more recent Wall Street Journal article here.)

Though I consider myself a cynic, I confess even I was shocked when I found out that the global-warming guru is a mere railway engineer. I learned that when I was speaking recently to a scientist skeptical of climate-change alarmism, Princeton physicist William Happer.

“I think the best way to restore the credibility of the IPCC is to have some resignations.” said Happer. “Someone has to resign and it has to be Pachauri.”

Maybe Pachauri could get a job at NJ Transit overseeing the tracks that lead to within walking distance of the Happer Laboratory of Atomic Physics in Princeton. One of the odder aspects of the media coverage of the climate-change controversy is that such serious scientists as Happer and fellow Princeton physics whiz Freeman Dyson have been treated as some sort of kooks while the alarmists led by Pachauri go unquestioned.

In fact, says Happer, climate science involves some of the most complicated questions of physics and astrophysics imaginable. The science simply can’t be reduced to the simple formulas promulgated by the IPCC, which he termed “an advocacy group for global warming alarmism that masquerades as a scientific organization.”

Happer points out that the tiny amount of CO-2 that man has introduced into the atmosphere could create only a correspondingly tiny rise in temperature. The climate-change crowd gets around this by contending that the CO-2 results in an increase in the amount of the most important greenhouse gas, water vapor.

But there are experts in that field as well who disagree. Among the most prominent is Don Easterbrook, a scientist at Western Washington University who is an expert on the “Pacific decadal oscillation.” This is the flow of water vapor over the planet’s largest body of water, the Pacific Ocean.

When I called Easterbrook the other day, he said there is evidence that the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is decreasing, not increasing. And while the climatologists are dismissing the blizzards that keep hitting us here on the East Coast as anomalies, Easterbrook predicts we’d better get used to them.

“The next decade is going to be colder, no doubt about it,” he told me.

Easterbrook based that not just on the Pacific currents but on the possibility that we are entering a “grand solar minimum,” a decline in sunspot activity. These seem to come along every 200 years or so, and they create mini ice ages, Easterbrook said.

“And it’s global cooling, not global warming, that’s the real killer,” he said.

Who’s right, the expert in laying tracks for the Chittagong choo-choo or the expert in the Pacific decadal oscillation? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

As for me, I like to focus on something that we journalists should be focusing on: the question of cui bono. That’s a Latin phrase that translates as “in whose interest?” In whose interest is all this alarmism?

Obviously, there are people like Al Gore who trade in carbon credits. Then there are the environmentalists who want to force their agenda on the world. There’s even the nuclear-power industry, which wants to use the threat of global warming against the aforementioned nuke-hating environmentalists.

And then of course there is that railway engineer from India. He is a follower in a long tradition of producing mantras for the masses. And he has performed his task admirably.

ALSO: Now this is funny. Watch as Al Gore proves he's every bit as bad at economics as he is at climatology. Gore tries to cover up the Climategate scandal in the New York Times today, while also preserving the prospects of earning millions trading carbon credits as part of the firm known on Wall Street as Blood and Gore:

But there are two big problems with this critique: First, there is no readily apparent alternative that would be any easier politically. It is difficult to imagine a globally harmonized carbon tax or a coordinated multilateral regulatory effort. The flexibility of a global market-based policy — supplemented by regulation and revenue-neutral tax policies — is the option that has by far the best chance of success. The fact that it is extremely difficult does not mean that we should simply give up.

In fact, every economist worth mentioning says that a carbon tax is preferable if curbing carbon output is your goal. So why is Al against it? Because there's no way traders can skim off a percentage, that's why.

And of course there's no reason the U.S. couldn't address its carbon output with a tax regardless of what the rest of the world did. No reason except that such a tax wouldn't enrich traders and empower bureaucrats, that is.

Next time, try to hide your conflict of interest a little better, Al.

ALSO: The Washington Post is doing a much better job of covering Climatetae. Note this article debunking the myth that the move to so-called "green jobs" would reduce unemployment


(pictures not in original article)
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A perfect storm is brewing for the IPCC

FROM-UK Telegraph

The emerging errors of the IPCC's 2007 report are not incidental but fundamental, says Christopher Booker

The news from sunny Bali that there is to be an international investigation into the conduct of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri would have made front-page headlines a few weeks back. But while Scotland and North America are still swept by blizzards, in their worst winter for decades, there has been something of a lull in the global warming storm – after three months when the IPCC and Dr Pachauri were themselves battered by almost daily blizzards of new scandals and revelations. And one reason for this lull is that the real message of all the scandals has been lost.

The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC's last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other "extreme weather events" were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The "science is settled", the "consensus" is intact.

But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.

All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC's 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists. Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.

Furthermore, it has also emerged in almost every case that the decision to include these scare stories rather than hard scientific evidence was deliberate. As several IPCC scientists have pointed out about the scare over Himalayan glaciers, for instance, those responsible for including it were well aware that proper science said something quite different. But it was inserted nevertheless – because that was the story wanted by those in charge.

In addition, we can now read in shocking detail the truth of the outrageous efforts made to ensure that the same 2007 report was able to keep on board IPCC's most shameless stunt of all – the notorious "hockey stick" graph purporting to show that in the late 20th century, temperatures had been hurtling up to unprecedented levels. This was deemed necessary because, after the graph was made the centrepiece of the IPCC's 2001 report, it had been exposed as no more than a statistical illusion. (For a full account see Andrew Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion, and also my own book The Real Global Warming Disaster.)

In other words, in crucial respects the IPCC's 2007 report was no more than reckless propaganda, designed to panic the world's politicians into agreeing at Copenhagen in 2009 that we should all pay by far the largest single bill ever presented to the human race, amounting to tens of trillions of dollars. And as we know, faced with the prospect of this financial and economic abyss, December's Copenhagen conference ended in shambles, with virtually nothing agreed.

What is staggering is the speed and the scale of the unravelling – assisted of course, just before Copenhagen, by "Climategate", the emails and computer codes leaked from East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. Their significance was the light they shone on the activities of a small group of British and US scientists at the heart of the IPCC, as they discussed ways of manipulating data to show the world warming faster than the evidence justified; fighting off legitimate requests for data from outside experts to hide their manipulations; and conspiring to silence their critics by excluding their work from scientific journals and the IPCC's 2007 report itself. (Again, a devastating analysis of this story has just been published by Stephen Mosher and Tom Fuller in Climategate: The CRUtape Letters).

Almost as revealing as the leaked documents themselves, however, was the recent interview given to the BBC by the CRU's suspended director, Dr Phil Jones, who has played a central role in the global warming scare for 20 years, not least as custodian of the most prestigious of the four global temperature records relied on by the IPCC. In his interview Jones seemed to be chucking overboard one key prop of warmest faith after another, as he admitted that the world might have been hotter during the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years ago than it is today, that before any rise in CO2 levels temperatures rose faster between 1860 and 1880 than they have done in the past 30 years, and that in the past decade their trend has been falling rather than rising.

The implications of all this for the warming scare, as it has been presented to us over the past two decades, can scarcely be overestimated. The reputation of the IPCC is in shreds. And this is to say nothing of the personal reputation of the man who was the mastermind of its 2007 report, its chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri.

It was in this newspaper that we first revealed how Pachauri has earned millions of pounds for his Delhi-based research institute Teri, and further details are still emerging of how he has parlayed his position into a worldwide business empire, including 17 lucrative contracts from the EU alone. But we should not expect the truth to break in too suddenly on this mass of vested interests. Too many people have too much at stake to allow the faith in man-made global warming, which has sustained them so long and which is today making so many of them rich, to be abandoned. The so-called investigations into Climategate and Dr Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann seem like no more than empty establishment whitewashes. There is little reason to expect that the inquiry into the record of the IPCC and Dr Pachauri that is now being set up by the UN Environment Programme and the world's politicians will be very different.

Since 1988, when the greatest scare the world has seen got under way, hundreds of billions
of pounds have been poured into academic research projects designed not to test the CO2 warming thesis but to take it as a given fact, and to use computer models to make its impacts seem as scary as possible. The new global "carbon trading" market, already worth $126 billion a year, could soon be worth trillions. Governments, including our own, are calling for hundreds of billions more to be chucked into absurd "carbon-saving" energy schemes, with the cost to be met by all of us in soaring taxes and energy bills.

With all this mighty army of gullible politicians, dutiful officials, busy carbon traders, eager "renewables" developers and compliant, funding-hungry academics standing to benefit from the greatest perversion of the principles of true science the world has ever seen, who are we to protest that their emperor has no clothes? (How apt that that fairy tale should have been written in Copenhagen.) Let all that fluffy white "global warming" continue to fall from the skies, while people shiver in homes that, increasingly, they will find they can no longer afford to heat. We have called into being a true Frankenstein's monster. It will take a mighty long time to cut it down to size.

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IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri to face independent inquiry

FROM-
UK Telegraph

Rajendra Pachauri, the controversial Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is to face an international inquiry into the performance of his organisation.


Environment and Climate ministers meeting in closed session in Bali last night insisted that an independent review should be carried out following the publicising of mistakes in its last report, and a row surrounding Dr Pachauri's robust response to his critics. If his management is found to be at fault his position could become untenable.

Participants in the unprecedented meeting – held at the annual assembly of the Governing Council of the United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) Governing Council in Bali – were sworn to secrecy over the decision and it is only expected to be announced after its detaled scope and composition have been worked out by UNEP and the World Meteorological Organisation, the two UN agencies that oversee the IPCC's work.

The ministers – led by Hillary Benn, the Environment Secretary,and his counterparts from Germany,. Norway, Algeria and Antigua and Barbuda – refused to allow Dr Pachauri to decide who would carry out the review, insisting it must be completely and demonstrably independent of the IPCC.

The two agencies are expected first to approach national academies of sciences and to ensure that it examines the management of the organisation as well as its scientific procedures.

The review is to report by August to allow time for its conclusions - and Dr Pachauri's position – to be assessed before the IPCC meets for its own annual assembly in Korea in October.

Achim Steiner, UNEP's Executive Director said that the IPCC faced a “crisis of confidence” with the public. , According to participants at the meeting, Dr Pachauri expressed regret for any mistakes that had been made, but stopped short of apologising for them. “He gave the impression of making an apology without actually doing so”, said one.

The participants add that he admitted only one mistake, a discredited prediction that the glaciers of the Himalayas would entirely melt away by 2035, for which the IPCC has already apologised. They say he described other alleged errors – such as a prediction that food production in parts of Africa might be cut in half by 2020 or the citing of studies by pressure groups rather than peer-reviewed research - as misunderstandings.

The ministers regard the mistakes as exaggerated, point out that they just concern a few sentences in a 3000 page report, and say they do not in any way undermine the basic science behind global warming. Their main concern has been over the aggressive way in which Dr Pachauri has responded to criticism, beginning with denouncing Indian research suggesting that the glaciers were not melting so rapidly as “voodoo science”.

Many wish he would resign,. But he was reelected unopposed less than 18 months ago,and has often rejected doing so. He refused to comment on the latest developments.


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Al Gore Is Lying Low -- for Good Reason

FROM-American Thinker

By Rex McBride

Maybe Al Gore's been advised by legal counsel to lie low. He may be the leader of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) movement, but he's not defending it in public, not even when it's falling apart and his new fortune is based upon it.

Mr. Gore and his financial backers earned millions of dollars in start-up "green" companies and carbon trading schemes. If the scam worked, he could've become the first "carbon billionaire."
"What goes up can fall down" applies to ill-gotten gains in the stock market or "carbon trading" schemes. In such schemes, it's foreseeable that trusting investors will (a) not only get hurt when the scam collapses, but they'll also (b) pursue legal remedies and sue him for fraud.

Mr. Gore's financial gains were based on the contradictory and error-plagued assertion that man's release of the trace gas CO2 will fry the planet.

Once it becomes clear to everyone that the AGW theory is based on cleverly manipulated data twisted by rigged computer models controlled by several dozen IPCC politicians/scientists, we can expect that investors who lose millions by investing in these companies will eventually haul Mr. Gore and the insider IPCC scientists into court.

Over the years, American tax dollars were poured down the fantasyland AGW "rat hole." Sooner or later, Al Gore needs to answer some hard questions. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait for lawsuits from private investors. Today, legal counsel will advise him to remain silent.

It's impossible to predict how many lawsuits, or what kind, might arise once everyone realizes that the AGW scam dwarfs Bernie Madoff's $50-billion Ponzi operation. New studies appear almost daily that further undercut AGW theory. The biggest daily newspaper in the Netherlands vindicated that country's leading AGW critic in the article "Henk Tennekes -- He was right after all."

Dr. Tennekes was fired in the 1990s from a prominent research position and blacklisted for debunking AGW theory. He upset the same IPCC scientists who control the leading "peer review" climate research journals and who blocked the publication of all contrary research in those journals for decades.

As investors learn the extent of the scam, Mr. Gore's start-up "green" companies will lose considerable value, like flaky dot-com companies lacking a real product. Investors in these "green" companies -- who reasonably relied upon Gore's alarming claims -- may pursue several possible remedies:

- derivative shareholder lawsuits, disgorging from Mr. Gore and other senior officers in these companies any illicit gains from any insider trading that could be proven; and/or

- lawsuits against brokers who did not perform the SEC's necessary "due diligence" research before peddling those shares; and/or

- civil RICO lawsuits against Mr. Gore and any IPCC scientists who participated in blocking the publication of contrary research, cooking the data, all of whose annual income skyrocketed from the public hysteria.

On the state level, it's impossible to predict if one or more state attorney generals will look back on the tobacco industry cases and decide, representing the taxpayers of his or her state, to file criminal and/or civil RICO actions against Gore and the enriched IPCC scientists.

(On the federal level, while President Obama is in office, the Justice Department will not file RICO or SEC actions against their buddy Al Gore. Remember, the president originally hoped that Boxer-Kerry cap-and-trade would generate over $600 billion in new corporate taxes -- "emergency" measures justified by fantasy AGW theory.

Remember the joke about the government taxing air? In the Twilight Zone of Boxer-Kerry, say hello to cap-and-trade.)

If Mr. Gore's "green" companies do crash and significantly injure private investors, attorneys in a civil lawsuit could compel Gore to answer questions like:

(1) When you claimed that "the science is settled," did you mean that it's "settled" that you and the IPCC scientists could make quick millions by manipulating the data and fomenting public hysteria?

(2) What does "peer review" mean if none of the IPCC scientists who controlled the academic journals protested that there was no original data to support your frightening claim of accelerated temperature increases after 1995?

(3) If the very scientists that the public trusted to act as the "check and balance" against careless research -- or worse yet, to protect against research fraud -- did not catch a "tiny" problem like not having original supporting data after 1995, does "peer review" mean that IPCC's scientists would secretly work in concert to cover each other's asses and keep the grants coming?

Such questions need answers.

In "The Dog Ate Global Warming", an article at the Cato Institute, Patrick J. Michaels noted that "[i]f there are no data, there's no science. U.S. taxpayers deserve to know the answer."

Obviously, Al Gore cannot be compelled to answer questions in a criminal court under the 5th Amendment. However, his admissible bank and stock portfolio records would prove his skyrocketing wealth, making him a "deep pocket."

Since 1970, the scope of RICO cases has grown far beyond prosecuting mafia operations. The law firm Nixon Peabody explained:

RICO was written in broad terms. To state a claim, a plaintiff must allege four elements: (1) conduct (2) of an enterprise (3) through a pattern (4) of racketeering activity... Each element of a RICO claim requires additional analysis: an "enterprise" is marked by association and control; a "pattern" requires a showing of "continuity" -- continuous and related behavior that amounts to, or poses a threat of, continued criminal violations; and "racketeering activity" involves the violation of designated federal laws ...

RICO lawsuits are now won in a wide variety of civil disputes -- e.g., insurance companies working in concert to delay/shortchange payments owed to dentists.

Other RICO cases resulted in court judgments against the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club, Catholic sex crimes, and Major League Baseball.

It violates federal law to fake taxpayer-funded research and then manipulate or destroy data to enrich oneself. If an insider group secretly conspires to do so, it looks and smells like RICO.
If more AGW-destroying news rolls in, and if Gore's "green" companies lose significant value, then shareholder derivative lawsuits and/or state RICO lawsuits will follow -- more so as the losses grow.

Mr. Gore is in hiding today -- no longer the "courageous" leader of the AGW movement. Apparently, Planet Earth is "no longer in grave danger" or "needing to be saved," but Gore could lose all of his ill-gotten assets.

If the victim list grows and criminal intent is proven, Mr. Gore could do serious time. After a much smaller scam, Bernie Madoff got 150 years.

What if you want answers about the potential misuse of tax dollars that enriched AGW insiders but didn't invest in one of Al Gore's fantasies?

Call Congress and demand that the GAO audit all climate change grants. GAO has the professional audit expertise to follow the money, gather objective facts, and report on any significant fraud or abuse.
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Cuda Chomps

“Global Warming” – More Like a Snow Job

Over the last few months, and even again today, very unsettling revelations have come to light about the “settled science” of man-made global warming. With all of these shoes dropping you’d think every member of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would be barefoot by now.

One thing after another keeps popping up to further discredit the theory of man-made global warming. The IPCC’s supposedly definitive report proving the theory is riddled with serious errors. The organization has been publicly chastised by everyone from its former chair to the heads of the UK’s biggest funder of climate research and Greenpeace UK. One of the world’s top climate change scientists, Prof. Phil Jones, has conceded that there’s been no significant warming since 1995; that the medieval period may have been warmer than today; and that he’s had trouble even keeping track of raw data crucial to the global warming theory. Yet President Obama still seeks to create a federal office for global warming, and they’re still talking about mandating their cap-and-tax plan that's based on discredited data.

The Obama administration’s environmental extremism also shows up in its aversion to oil and gas development. A true all-of-the-above approach to energy would mean allowing oil and gas explorers to drill here and drill now because America has the proven reserves needed to meet our energy challenges. A new industry study reveals that the federal government's current restrictions on oil and gas drilling in Alaska and off the U.S. coastline will cost us $2.36 trillion through 2029. Think of the millions of U.S. jobs we could create, and how much more secure America would be, if we had a true free market approach to energy independence that allowed us to finally drill!

And though I applaud the President’s newly declared interest in nuclear power, it should be noted that he’s merely following through on loan guarantees authorized during the prior administration. What’s more, while the White House now touts the building of new nuclear power plants, its budget inexplicably calls for cutting funding to the proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. A real nuclear energy plan requires a strategy for dealing with nuclear waste storage and recycling.

The man-made global warming hysteria isn’t based on sound science, and the Obama administration’s energy policy isn’t based on sound economics. If the climategate revelations teach us anything, it’s that we need to cool down the rhetoric and fire up our common sense.

- Sarah Palin


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"catastrophic free fall"

FROM-NY POST

By STEVEN F. HAYWARD

The climate-change campaign is in catastrophic free fall.

Nearly every day brings a new embarrassment or retraction for the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the supposed gold standard for "consensus" science. The withdrawal this week of BP, ConocoPhillips and Caterpillar from the main US business lobby for greenhouse-gas controls is the latest political blow to the campaign.

The anti-warming lobby long demonized skeptics as the moral equivalent of Holocaust deniers while warning of climate "tipping points." Now, the "Climategate" scandal that broke in November is looking like a true tipping point: The leaked e-mails have done to the climate-change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam War debate 40 years ago -- changed the narrative decisively.

For years, skeptics have been pointing out serious defects or gross exaggerations in the climate narrative -- glaciers that weren't actually melting; weak or incomplete data in the records of surface temperature that supposedly proved unprecedented warming; a complete lack of backup for claims that storms and drought are growing more severe. Plus, global temperatures have been flat for the last decade -- increasingly falsifying the computer models that project our doom.

The media long ignored every criticism, and generally joined the climate campaigners in denouncing skeptics for their turpitude. Now it's playing catch-up.

The latest bombshell is an admission from Phil Jones, the East Anglia University scientist at the center of the "Climategate" scandal: He says his raw data (a vital resource for those claiming climate change) is in such disarray that it probably can't be replicated or verified.

He also admits that the medieval warm period may have been as warm as today -- devasting the claim that today's temperatures are the clear result of modern industry. More, he agrees that there's been no statistically significant warming for the last 15 years.

Jones hedged a bit on all these points, but it is telling that he broke ranks from the climate campaigners, who increasingly resemble a two-year-old having a tantrum as they stoutly deny the medieval warm period and that global temperatures have flattened out.

But the climate campaign's most ludicrous contortion is its response to the recent record snowfalls across the eastern United States. Ordinary citizens, repeatedly shoveling snow from their sidewalk, see global warming as a farce.

In answer, the climate campaigners note that "weather is not climate" and that localized weather events are consistent with climate "change." They may be right -- yet these are the same folks who jumped up and down claiming that Hurricane Katrina was positive proof that catastrophic global warming had arrived, even though the strong 2005 hurricane season was followed by four quiet years for tropical storms that made a hash of that narrative.

The ruckus exposes the greatest problem of Al Gore & Co.: They've pointed to any weather anomaly -- cold winters, warm winters, in-between winters -- as proof of climate change. That is, they can't name one weather pattern or event that would be inconsistent with their theory.

The citizenry seems to prefer common sense -- opinion surveys show declining public belief in global warming.

That outcome was predictable. Nearly 40 years ago, the distinguished political scientist Anthony Downs outlined the "issue-attention cycle," a five-stage process.

The public, activists and (especially) the media first discover an issue, then grow euphorically alarmed over it and agitate for action, generating piles of scary headlines.

Then comes the crucial third step -- where the public comes to recognize that the problem has been exaggerated or misconceived, and notice the price tag for sweeping action. This happened last year with the US debate over the "cap and trade" anti-warming bill, followed by the collapse of the Copenhagen process.

That set the stage for Downs' fourth step: declining public interest and media attention -- which yields the last stage, the post-problem.

The climate-change circus isn't yet ready to join such past enthusiasms as the "population bomb" or the Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" nonsense: It has too much political and institutional momentum behind it, and there is no other ready outlet for the nearly endless supply of environmental zealotry.

But the whole climate campaign now resembles a Broadway musical that has run too long, with sagging box office and declining enthusiasm from a dwindling audience. Someone needs to break the bad news to the players that it's closing time for the climate horror show.

Steven F. Hayward is the F.K. Weyer haeuser Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of the forthcoming "Almanac of Environmental Trends."


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STOP THE PRESSES !

Sanity in the Main Stream Media

FROM-UK Mail


MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENT:
The professor’s amazing climate change retreat

Untold billions of pounds have been spent on turning the world green and also on financing the dubious trade in carbon credits.

Countless gallons of aviation fuel have been consumed carrying experts, lobbyists and politicians to apocalyptic conferences on global warming.
Every government on Earth has changed its policy, hundreds of academic institutions, entire school curricula and the priorities of broadcasters and newspapers all over the world have been altered – all to serve the new doctrine that man is overheating the planet and must undertake heroic and costly changes to save the world from drowning as the icecaps melt.
You might have thought that all this was based upon well-founded, highly competent research and that those involved had good reason for their blazing, hot-eyed certainty and their fierce intolerance of dissent.
But, thanks to the row over leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit, we now learn that this body’s director, Phil Jones, works in a disorganised fashion amid chaos and mess.

Interviewed by the highly sympathetic BBC, which still insists on describing the leaked emails as ‘stolen’, Professor Jones has conceded that he ‘did not do a thorough job’ of keeping track of his own records.

His colleagues recall that his office was ‘often surrounded by jumbled piles of papers’.
Even more strikingly, he also sounds much less ebullient about the basic theory, admitting that there is little difference between global warming rates in the Nineties and in two previous periods since 1860 and accepting that from 1995 to now there has been no statistically significant warming.
He also leaves open the possibility, long resisted by climate change activists, that the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ from 800 to 1300 AD, and thought by many experts to be warmer than the present period, could have encompassed the entire globe.

This is an amazing retreat, since if it was both global and warmer, the green movement’s argument that our current position is ‘unprecedented’ would collapse.
It is quite reasonable to suggest that human activity may have had some effect on climate.

There is no doubt that careless and greedy exploitation has done much damage to the planet.

But in the light of the ‘Climategate’ revelations, it is time for governments, academics and their media cheerleaders to be more modest in their claims and to treat sceptics with far more courtesy.
The question is not settled.

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African crops yield another catastrophe for the IPCC

One more alarming claim in the IPCC's 2007 report is disintegrating under closer examination,

says Christopher Booker

FROM-UK Telegraph

Ever more question marks have been raised in recent weeks over the reputations of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and of its chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri. But the latest example to emerge is arguably the most bizarre and scandalous of all. It centres on a very specific scare story which was included in the IPCC's 2007 report, although it was completely at odds with the scientific evidence – including that produced by the British expert in charge of the relevant section of the report. Even more tellingly, however, this particular claim has repeatedly been championed by Dr Pachauri himself.

Only last week Dr Pachauri was specifically denying that the appearance of this claim in two IPCC reports, including one of which he was the editor, was an error. Yet it has now come to light that the IPCC, ignoring the evidence of its own experts, deliberately published the claim for propaganda purposes.

One of the most widely quoted and most alarmist passages in the main 2007 report was a warning that, by 2020, global warming could reduce crop yields in some countries in Africa by 50 per cent. Dr Pachauri not only allowed this claim to be included in the short Synthesis Report, of which he was co-editor, but has publicly repeated it many times since.

The origin of this claim was a report written for a Canadian advocacy group by Ali Agoumi, a Moroccan academic who draws part of his current income from advising on how to make applications for "carbon credits". As his primary sources he cited reports for three North African governments. But none of these remotely supported what he wrote. The nearest any got to providing evidence for his claim was one for the Moroccan government, which said that in serious drought years, cereal yields might be reduced by 50 per cent. The report for the Algerian government, on the other hand, predicted that, on current projections, "agricultural production will more than double by 2020". Yet it was Agoumi's claim that climate change could cut yields by 50 per cent that was headlined in the IPCC's Working Group II report in 2007.

What made this even odder, however, was that the group's
co-chairman was a British agricultural expert, Dr Martin Parry, whose consultancy group, Martin Parry Associates, had been paid £75,000 by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) for two reports which had come to totally different conclusions. Specifically designed to inform the IPCC's 2007 report, these predicted that by 2020 any changes were likely to be insignificant. The worst case they could come up with was that by 2080 climate change might decrease crop yields by "up to 30 per cent".

British taxpayers poured out money for the section of the IPCC report for which Dr Parry was responsible. Defra paid £2.5 million through the Met Office, plus £330,000 for Dr Parry's salary as co-chairman, and a further £75,000 to his consultancy for two more reports on the impact of global warming on world food supplies. Yet when it came to the impact on Africa, all this peer-reviewed work – including further expert reports by Britain's Dr Mike Hulme and Dutch and German teams – was ignored in favour of a prediction from one Moroccan activist at odds with his own cited sources.

However, the story then got worse when Dr Pachauri himself came to edit and co-author the IPCC's Synthesis Report (for which the IPCC paid his Delhi-based Teri institute, out of the £400,000 allocated for its production). Not only did Pachauri's version again give prominence to Agoumi's 50 per cent figure, but he himself has repeated the claim on numerous occasions since, in articles, interviews and speeches –such as the one he gave to a climate summit in Potsdam last September, where he boasted he was speaking "in the voice of the world's scientific community".

Only last week, in an interview available on YouTube, Dr Pachauri was asked about errors in the IPCC's 2007 report and his own Synthesis Report, with specific reference to the loss of North African crops. His reply was that – aside from the prediction that the IPCC has now had to disown, that Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035 – the reports contained "no errors". Passages such as those on African crops were "not errors and we are absolutely certain that what we have said over that can be substantiated".

In the wake of all the other recent scandals, "Africa-gate" may be the most damaging of all, because of the involvement of Dr Pachauri himself. Not only is the reputation of the IPCC in tatters, but that of its chairman appears irreperably damaged. Yet the world's politicians cannot afford to see him resign because, if he goes, the whole sham edifice they have sworn by would come tumbling down.



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Crisis Of Confidence In The IPCC

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The bird man speaketh.

I was reading this article at the CSM sight and came across this paragraph.

Jeff Price, managing director for adaptation for the World Wildlife Fund and a lead author for IPCC reports released in 2001 and 2007, argues that the IPCC already has rules that, if more rigorously enforced, would reduce the already small likelihood of specious data finding their way into IPCC assessments.

Here is Jeff Price and his bio over at WWF by the way.



I just find it the height of hypocrisy that scientist with obvious bias can move back and forth between environmental advocacy groups (he is not alone) and the IPCC and government agencies and nobody sees anything wrong with it. Let a scientist accept a grant from Exxon Mobil and he is accused of being bought and paid for by special interest. As if a person who passionately believes in environmental causes and is employed by organizations that champion those causes is somehow not susceptible to bias ?

It is well past time that special interest be fairly applied to all who are involved with it. I also find his comment a bit disenguous being as the organization he now works for is the organization that had so much "specious data " inserted into the IPCC report he was a lead author of. This stinks to high heaven.




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The end of the IPCC

By S. Fred Singer

FROM-American Thinker


Almost daily, we learn about new problems with the formerly respected UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): In their 2001 report, they claimed that the 20th century was "unusual" and blamed it on human-released greenhouse gases. Their infamous temperature graph shown there, shaped like a hockey stick, did away with the well-established Medieval Warm Period (around 1000AD, when Vikings were able to settle in Southern Greenland and grow crops there) and the following Little Ice Age (around 1400 to 1800AD). Two Canadians exposed the bad data used by the IPCC and the statistical errors in their analysis.

The most recent IPCC report of 2007 predicted the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers within 25 years; the imminent death of nearly half the Amazon rain forest; and major damage from stronger hurricanes -- all in contradiction to expert opinions offered by its appointed reviewers, but ignored by IPCC editors for mostly ideological reasons. More scandalous even, the IPCC based their lurid predictions on anecdotal, non-peer-reviewed sources -- not at all in accord with its solemnly announced principles and scientific standards.

These events showed not only a general sloppiness of IPCC procedures but also an extreme bias -- quite inappropriate to a supposedly impartial scientific survey. By themselves, they do not invalidate the basic IPCC conclusion -- that a warming in the latter half of the 20th century was human-caused, presumably by the rise of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. Yet all of these missteps pale in comparison to ClimateGate, which calls into question the very temperature data used by the IPCC's main policy result.

As the leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia (UK) reveal, this IPCC conclusion -- that Global Warming is anthropogenic -- is based on manipulated data and therefore flawed -- as are demands for the control of CO2 emissions, like the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen Accord. In my opinion, ClimateGate is a much more serious issue than simply sloppiness and ideological distortion; ClimateGate suggests conspiracy to commit fraud.

Let us recall: The e-mails leaked in the fall of 2009 allow us to trace the machinations of a small but influential band of British and US climate scientists who played the lead role in the IPCC reports. It appears that this group, which controlled access to basic temperature data, was able to produce a "warming" by manipulating the analysis of the data, but refused to share information on the basic data or details of their analysis with independent scientists who requested them -- in violation of Freedom of Information laws. In fact, they went so far as to keep any dissenting views from being published -- by monopolizing the peer-review process, aided by ideologically cooperative editors of prestigious journals, like Science and Nature.

Woe to these dissenting scientists, however. The younger ones were denied an opportunity to advance or receive academic tenure -- or were simply fired. The independent ones were maligned as "deniers" and ostracized. In many instances, commercially operated 'smear blogs' invented slurs; the most common ones being "tool of the oil industry" or "paid by the tobacco lobby." In my own case, my Wiki bio also carried additional malicious accusations; the most bizarre one was that I believed in the existence of Martians.

We learn from the e-mails that the ClimateGate gang was able to "hide the decline" [of global temperature] by applying what they termed as "tricks," and that they intimidated editors and forced out those judged to be "uncooperative." No doubt, thorough investigations, now in progress or planned, will disclose the full range of their nefarious activities. But it is clear that this small cabal was able to convince much of the world that climate disasters were impending -- unless drastic steps were taken. Not only were most of the media, public, and politicians misled, but so were many scientists, national academies of science, and professional organizations -- and even the Norwegian committee that awarded the 2007 Peace Prize to the IPCC and Al Gore, the chief apostle of climate alarmism.

In this enterprise, the group was aided not only by environmental zealots, anti-technology Luddites, utopian one-worlders, and population-control fanatics, but also by bureaucrats, businesses, brokers and bankers, who had learned how to game the system and profit from government grants and subsidies for exotic schemes to produce "carbon-free" energy and from the trading of carbon permits. Hundreds of billions have already been wasted -- most of this in transfers of tax revenues to a favored few.

These sums pale, however, in comparison to the trillions that would have been spent in future if some of the mitigation schemes had come to fruition -- such as an extension and major expansion of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to control greenhouse-gas emissions. Fortunately for the world economy and for taxpayers in industrialized nations, these schemes collapsed at the Copenhagen climate conference in Dec 2009. Clearly, developing nations did not want to take on the sacrifices and restrictions on growth. There was little concern expressed about climate; Copenhagen was mostly about transfer of money from rich to poor countries - or more precisely, from the poor in rich countries to the rich in poor ones.

Of course, this breakdown in negotiating global controls does not stop unilateral actions. Major developing nations, like India and China, have already refused to act. Australia's parliament has so far turned down attempts to impose limits on the emission of greenhouse gases, which many still believe to cause significant global warming -- in spite of contrary evidence. The European Union is likely to persist in its misguided efforts to continue and expand the Kyoto restrictions. In the US, the House has (barely) passed the calamitous Waxman-Markey "Cap & Trade" bill; the US Senate likely will not pass a similar bill in 2010, an election year.

There is still the US-EPA's drive to extend the Clean Air Act to include carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as "pollutants." But with the evidence of ClimateGate in hand, EPA's attempt to provide the necessary scientific justification for its "Endangerment Finding" will surely fail. Whoever leaked the incriminating e-mails deserves a medal for saving the US economy from certain ruin.


The writer, an atmospheric physicist, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service, is the organizer of NIPCC (Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change) and coauthor of its reports "Nature, not human activity, rules the climate" [2008] and "Climate Change Reconsidered" [2009].

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Climate Group Admits Mistakes

FROM-WSJ

Some IPCC Officials Say the U.N.-Sponsored Group Must Improve Procedures for Reviewing Reports

By JEFFREY BALL And KEITH JOHNSON

Some top officials of a Nobel Prize-winning climate-science organization are acknowledging the panel made some mistakes amid a string of recent revelations questioning the accuracy of some of the information in its influential reports.

Officials of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations-sponsored network of scientists whose reports strongly influence global policy on greenhouse-gas emissions, initially played down some of the allegations and criticized those who called them important. Increasingly, however, they are acknowledging the panel's mistakes and saying it needs to tighten its procedures.

"This has not increased the credibility of the IPCC," said Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist who is co-chairing one of the main sections of the IPCC's next big climate-change report, due out in 2013 and 2014. "There is some room for improvement."

Scientists and other experts involved in the IPCC say most of the information assembled and reported by the organization is valid. They say the revelations don't impugn the IPCC's main conclusions: that climate change is largely due to man-made greenhouse-gas emissions and that it could have dangerous consequences. But though they say each revelation itself is small, they worry that the continuing string of them is damaging the IPCC's credibility—not just with experts who question the premise of human-induced climate change, but with the public at large.

In citing climate change as an important issue, a U.N. conference in December in Copenhagen didn't rely "on the precise date of the demise of Himalayan glaciers, or African agriculture" to tackle global warming, says Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice chairman of the IPCC and a professor at the Institut d'Astronomie et de Géophysique Georges Lemaître at the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, mentioning subjects that have generated criticism of the IPCC. "It's the body of evidence" in the whole report that makes the case for action to curb emissions, he says.

Officials say they don't know of additional mistakes in the IPCC's seminal 2007 report, but they say that, given that the report runs more than 3,000 pages, additional mistakes may come to light. "I do not expect serious mistakes," Mr. Edenhofer said. "But I'm quite sure that if people read the 3,000 pages, there will be some more mistakes."

A number of climate-change skeptics and public officials, including U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, have said the IPCC's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, should resign. IPCC officials said Mr. Pachauri was traveling and unavailable to comment Tuesday.

A U.N. spokesman said IPCC rules don't appear to give the U.N. secretary-general authority to dismiss the IPCC chairman, and noted that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hasn't called for Mr. Pachauri's departure. Under IPCC rules, the panel's members—national-government officials—choose the IPCC chairman.

That officials with the IPCC are on the defensive is a big turnabout from 2007, when the then-obscure U.N. organization shared a Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. The IPCC got the prize for its 2007 report concluding that climate change is "unequivocal" and is "very likely" caused by man. The report motivated countries around the world, including the U.S., to push for limits on greenhouse-gas emissions.

But recent revelations have undercut the Geneva-based organization. Among them: Emails were released on the Internet in which leading scientists at an influential U.K. climate-science institute seemed to squelch dissent from researchers who disagreed with them; the 2007 report incorrectly said that Himalayan glaciers could disappear as soon as 2035; and it was revealed that scientists hadn't peer-reviewed a claim in the 2007 report that climate change would halve African agricultural yields by 2020.

Thousands of scientists and other experts volunteer their time with the IPCC to issue joint pronouncements every five or six years about one of the most complex scientific fields. The group, established by the U.N. Environment Program and the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, is administered by a paid staff of only a few dozen people and doesn't do any scientific research itself; its job is to assess work done by others, providing information for policy makers.

Experts involved in writing IPCC reports say the 2007 document's errors point up gaps in the organization's checks and balances. "They are not big mistakes," said Mr. Edenhofer, who is deputy director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research in Germany. But, he added, "We have to think about the procedures again." In particular, he, said, IPCC reports have to be more careful about noting the uncertainties surrounding information that hasn't been subjected to peer reviewamong scientists.

The most glaring mistake in the 2007 report is the claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035, several IPCC authors say. That claim wasn't based on any peer-reviewed scientific paper, but on a decade-old interview given by an Indian glacier expert. Some within the IPCC suggest the mistake may be a typo traced back to a 1996 U.N.-sponsored study—which also wasn't peer-reviewed—that said the glaciers would disappear by 2350.

Chris Field, co-chair of another section of the IPCC's next big report and director of the department of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Palo Alto, Calif., said he thinks the IPCC would have caught the error had the team of scientists writing the report chapter on the Himalayas included a glacier expert. It didn't.

"The issue with the Himalayan glaciers really represents something where the procedures fell through," Mr. Field said. He added: "The challenge is the whole enterprise is working on volunteer labor."

Last year, before the disclosure of the Himalayan mistake, IPCC officials decided on a procedural change that might make it more likely that such a mistake would be detected in the future, Mr. Edenhofer said. Each big report consists of three parts, and the IPCC will allow more time between the publication of each of part, so the authors of one part will be likelier to read the others and flag errors.

Some people involved with the IPCC said they saw no reason why Mr. Pachauri should go. "He's dedicated an amazing amount of time and commitment and intellectual energy to the IPCC," said Mr. Field.

U.S. officials said they don't believe revelations of mistakes in IPCC reports undermine cause for concern about global warming. "It's not useful when mistakes are made, but the overwhelming body of evidence [on climate change] is not disturbed by those events," Todd Stern, the Obama administration's top international negotiator on climate-change policy, told an audience Tuesday at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning Washington think tank. "It's nothing short of crazy for us to put our heads in the sand and do nothing" about climate change.

Governments, including the U.S.'s, are now soliciting applicants to help write the IPCC's next climate-change report. Robert Marlay, deputy director of the U.S. Department of Energy's office of climate change policy and technology, who is involved in the solicitation process, says that more people are expressing interest than in prior years. The recent revelations "do not change any of the core conclusions from prior IPCC reports," he said in an email Tuesday, "but they do underscore the importance of getting strong, science-based researchers involved in the process, keeping an open but critically challenging mind, and grounding conclusions in peer-reviewed literature."


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UN Climate Cronies

FROM- Pajamas Media

With UN climate guru Rajendra Pachauri under fire for alleged conflicts of interest and the purveying of flawed “science,” another United Nations eco-official is stepping forward to defend UN climate findings.

His name is Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Program, or UNEP, based in Nairobi. If you are curious about potential conflicts of interest among the UN climate crowd, Steiner, along with Pachauri, is someone to watch.

Like Pachauri, Steiner is still talking about “overwhelming evidence” supporting the findings of Al Gore’s co-Nobelist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — despite the growing body of evidence that the IPCC’s findings were more a product of UN politics than of science. In recent remarks featured as a top item on the UN’s official news site, Steiner has just praised the IPCC and re-issued the UN’s usual apocalyptic warnings: “Any delay… risks of a magnitude…urgent international response” — etc.

Who is Achim Steiner? A German, born in Brazil, he is a longtime environmentalist, former head from 2001-2006 of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, or IUCN. (Sample of UN climate networking — take a deep breath, don’t even try to follow this, just roll with it: The IUCN has been phenomenally intertwined over the years with the UN cast of climate characters. When Steiner left the IUCN in 2006, he was succeeded there by a sister-in-law of a former U.S. ambassador to the UN, Richard Holbrooke. This Holbrooke in-law, Julia Marton-Lefevre , in turn, had just finished serving as rector of the UN University for Peace, in Costa Rica, which had been greatly beefed up in the years prior to her arrival by the so-called godfather of the Kyoto Treaty, Maurice Strong – first head of the same UNEP that Achim Steiner now runs).

Anyway, in December, 2005, Achim Steiner served as a judge on a panel in Dubai that awarded a $500,000 environmental prize to then-Secretary-General of the UN, Kofi Annan. With a big smile, at a banquet in Dubai, Annan — then the UN’s top official — accepted this six-figure purse for his personal use. About three months later, Annan named Steiner, one of the judges who picked Annan for the prize, to head UNEP.

The press raised questions about whether this was a potential conflict of interest. Annan, months after accepting the $500,000 prize, and weeks after the flap over his appointment of Steiner to UNEP, finally said he would turn over his fat cash prize to UN relief efforts. But Achim Steiner did not give up his UNEP job. The UN claimed there was no conflict of interest. Steiner has since been running UNEP, which fields a $225 million annual budget. Based in Nairobi, UNEP is way off the radar of most media scrutiny, and under Steiner’s management it is evidently on board with the agenda to shove the Pachauri-IPCC agenda down your throat, however questionable the “science.”

This tale of Kofi’s cash prize does not figure in Steiner’s official UN biography. But something that does, if you scroll down to the end, is Steiner’s position on the advisory board of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, or CCICED, which describes itself on its web site as “a high level non-governmental advisory body” set up in 1992 by the Chinese government.

Perhaps by the UN’s flabby standards this does not count as a conflict of interest. But the UN, last I checked, is a public institution, bankrolled in substantial part by U.S. tax dollars, and set up to serve its member states. Is it appropriate that Achim Steiner, while serving as senior public servant, head of a major UN agency, UNEP, should also be on the advisory board of a Chinese NGO set up the Chinese government?

Some of the other folks connected with this same CCICED have names you might also start to recognize. A 2002 meeting of this body was keynoted by Maurice Strong ,a former UN senior official now living in China. And among the 23 “International Members” currently listed on the CCICED’s web site are not only Achim Steiner, head of UNEP, but also the IPCC’s Rajendra Pachauri. (And, in case you are interested in the trajectory of former UN officials and affiliates, two of the other members are former UNEP director Klaus Toepfer, who preceded Steiner at the UN agency; and former rector of the UN University for Peace, who succeed Steiner at the IUCN, Julia Marton-Lefevre — see italics above).

Bottom line: Does anyone trying to follow this spaghetti start to wonder if the UN should have a much clearer policy to prohibit and penalize conflicts of interest? Especially among high-ranking officials prone to issuing apocalyptic calls to re-engineer the economy of the planet – under their direction, and at vast cost to the rest of us?
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