The story is getting curiouser and curiouser. Someone called it “Wateragate 2.”
First there was a story in The Telegraph,London, questioning the business interests of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, head of the New Delhi-based The Energy Research Institute, chairman of the IPCC (the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
It accused him of “making a fortune from his links with ‘carbon trading’ companies.” Click here to read the story: Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri.
Dr Pachauri described the report as “a pack of lies”.
A few days later The Telegraph ran another story: The questions Dr Pachauri still has to answer:
At the least it seems that Dr Pachauri’s position as the world’s “top climate official” has been earning a very substantial income for the institute of which he is director-general; and the only way to avoid further questioning must now be for both Dr Pachauri and Teri to come out into the open over all those issues that remain obscure.
Then The Sunday Times ran a story: World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown:
Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.
In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.
It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
A followup story in Bloomberg quotes Dr Pachauri as saying that research by IPCC suggesting Himalayan glaciers may disappear by 2035 “needs to be investigated anew…”
An award-winning United Nations panel is re-examining its research about how fast Himalaya’s glaciers are melting, the top UN climate-change scientist said.
Research by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggesting Himalayan glaciers may disappear by 2035 needs to be investigated anew following a report in the London-based Times newspaper that flawed data may have been used, said Rajendra K. Pachauri, head of the Nobel prize-winning group.
“We are looking at the issue and will be able to comment on the report after examining the facts. The science doesn’t change: Glaciers are melting across the globe and those in the Himalayas are no different,” he said in a telephone interview. “We’re not changing anything till we make an assessment.”
Below, from Richard North‘s (co-author of the first story in The Telegraph) post titled “Pachauri: there’s money in them glaciers,” at EUReferendum:
With the case for more research thus established, Pachauri’s institute, TERI, approached the wealthy Carnegie Corporation of New York through a consortium led by the Global Centre for funding to carry out precisely the work to which his own “independent” report had drawn attention.
In November 2008, they were successful, being awarded a $500,000 grant for “research, analysis and training on water-related security and humanitarian challenges to South Asia posed by melting Himalaya glaciers.” This helped Dr Pachauri set up the TERI Glaciology team, putting at its head now professor Syed Iqbal Hasnain.
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