IPCC and the Glacier Shenanigans

The head of the UN’s IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, is claiming an increase in credibility for his organization by admitting to the falseness of the glacier melt claims that became a main feature of IPCC anthropogenic global warming lore.

The falseness was driven home recently by an outside investigator, Dr. Graham Cogley, a glacier expert at Trent University in Canada, who found that the estimates were based on wildly inaccurate calculations. It was later discovered that the melt-by-2035 claims were from an off-the-cuff phone interview between a magazine journalist and an Indian scientist, Dr Syed Hasnain, who now claims he was referring to certain glaciers and not the entire massif. Hasnain is now employed at TERI, under Pachauri.

These unsupported and unreviewed claims were accepted and included in IPCC reports as truth by Dr. Murari Lal. Lal, who now apparently works directly for Pachauri, has just admitted that the glacier claims were placed in the IPCC reports for reasons of political activism, even though he knew that the claims were without scientific merit. According to the Mail On-Line, Lal said,

”‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’”

The Mail also says,

”One of the problems bedevilling Himalayan glacier research is a lack of reliable data. But an authoritative report published last November by the Indian government said: ‘Himalayan glaciers have not in any way exhibited, especially in recent years, an abnormal annual retreat.’

When this report was issued, Raj Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, denounced it as ‘voodoo science’.

Having been forced to apologise over the 2035 claim, Dr Pachauri blamed Dr Lal, saying his team had failed to apply IPCC procedures.

It was an accusation rebutted angrily by Dr Lal. ‘We as authors followed them to the letter,’ he said. ‘Had we received information that undermined the claim, we would have included it.’

However, an analysis of those 500-plus formal review comments, to be published tomorrow by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the new body founded by former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, suggests that when reviewers did raise issues that called the claim into question, Dr Lal and his colleagues simply ignored them”.

For example, Hayley Fowler of Newcastle University, suggested that their draft did not mention that Himalayan glaciers in the Karakoram range are growing rapidly, citing a paper published in the influential journal Nature.

In their response, the IPCC authors said, bizarrely, that they were ‘unable to get hold of the suggested references’, but would ‘consider’ this in their final version. They failed to do so.

The Japanese government commented that the draft did not clarify what it meant by stating that the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing by 2035 was ‘very high’. ‘What is the confidence level?’ it asked.

The authors’ response said ‘appropriate revisions and editing made’. But the final version was identical to their draft.

Last week, Professor Georg Kaser, a glacier expert from Austria, who was lead author of a different chapter in the IPCC report, said when he became aware of the 2035 claim a few months before the report was published, he wrote to Dr Lal, urging him to withdraw it as patently untrue.

Dr Lal claimed he never received this letter. ‘He didn’t contact me or any of the other authors of the chapter,’ he said. ”

And from the Times of India,

”But the IPCC chief seems to be feeling some unease, particularly as he has even had to recently defend himself against attacks on his own integrity, with the British press accusing him of using his position to help companies he was associated with, pointing to a clear conflict of interest.

There was no way TERI or IPCC could penalize Hasnain, he said, or any other author who may have "erred" because they are not employees of IPCC. The fact that IPCC's own due diligence, verification and monitoring mechanisms may need to be questioned too was not acknowledged by the Nobel prize winning body's chief. Instead, Pachauri described the IPCC's processes as "robust and solid".

From the Times On-Line,

”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.

An abstract of the grant application published on Carnegie's website said: "The Himalaya glaciers, vital to more than a dozen major rivers that sustain hundreds of millions of people in South Asia, are melting and receding at a dangerous rate.
"One authoritative study reported that most of the glaciers in the region "will vanish within forty years as a result of global warming, resulting in widespread water shortages,"

The Carnegie money was specifically given to aid research into "the potential security and humanitarian impact on the region" as the glaciers began to disappear. Pachauri has since acknowledged that this threat, if it exists, will take centuries to have any serious effect.

The money was initially given to the Global Centre, an Icelandic Foundation which then channelled it, with Carnegie's involvement, to TERI.

The cash was acknowledged by TERI in a press release, issued on January 15, just before the glacier scandal became public, in which Pachauri repeated the claims of imminent glacial melt.

It said: ""According to predictions of scientific merit they may indeed melt away in several decades."

The same release also quoted Dr Syed Hasnain, the glaciologist who, back in 1999, made the now discredited claim that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035.
He now heads Pachauri's glaciology unit at TERI which sought the grants and which is carrying out the glacier research”