Ever since the revelation that the IPCC presented advocacy speculation as “settled science” on Himalayan glaciers and Amazon rainforests, and then hid the errors, AGW skeptics have been demanding the resignation of Rajendra Pachauri, the railroad engineer who runs the UN body. Now the head of Greenpeace UK has also called for Pachauri’s resignation, making the obvious point that his credibility as a scientist has been too badly damaged:
The head of the UN’s climate change body is under pressure to resign after one of his strongest allies in the environmental movement said his judgment was flawed and called for a new leader to restore confidence in climatic science.
Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has insisted that he will remain in post for another four years despite having failed to act on a serious error in the body’s 2007 report.
John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK , said that Dr Pachauri should have acted as soon as he had been informed of the error, even though issuing a correction would have embarrassed the IPCC on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit. …
The IPCC issued a correction and apology on January 20, three days after the error had made global headlines. Mr Sauven said: “Mistakes will always be made but it’s how you handle those mistakes which affects the credibility of the institution. Pachauri should have put his hand up and said ‘we made a mistake’. It’s in these situations that your character and judgment is tested. Do you make the right judgment call? He clearly didn’t.”
The IPCC needed a new chairman who would hold public confidence by introducing more rigorous procedures, Mr Sauven said. “The IPCC needs to regain credibility. Is that going to happen with Pachauri [as chairman]? I don’t think so. We need someone held in high regard who has extremely good judgment and is seen by the global public as someone on their side.[“]
In an organization with any kind of accountability, Pachauri would already have received his walking papers. The UN, however, doesn’t have that kind of accountability. This is the same organization that allowed billions of dollars to flow into Saddam Hussein’s hands while supposedly enforcing sanctions on his dictatorship in Iraq, while turning a blind eye to the starvation of Iraqis that Oil for Food was supposed to avoid. Heads didn’t roll after that, nor after UN peacekeepers in over a dozen missions were exposed for sexually exploiting women and children.
Given that track record, it’s difficult to see how anyone expects Pachauri to resign or even be asked to do so. And that may not be such a bad thing anyway; the longer the UN tolerates his presence, the more it demonstrates its own corruption and the unveiled bias and non-science basis of the anthropogenic global-warming movement. Even some journalists have begun regretting their adoption of AGW as gospel, as Kam Napier writes in this month’s Honolulu Magazine:
Because of manmade global warming, I warned in 1996, that “sea levels could rise as much as three feet by the year 2100 … warming can lead to hotter and more frequent heat waves … stronger and more frequent hurricanes to Hawai‘i … endanger native plants species [and] coral reefs.” These dire predictions came from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Researchers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia provide much of the IPCC’s analysis and predictions. In November 2009, hackers released thousands of e-mails from the CRU, going back years, and it is these e-mails that reveal the very unscientific, unethical activities I described above.
I feel I’ve been had.
One thing I could not have known in 1996 was that the IPCC’s warming predictions would be wrong. Mean global surface temperatures have not risen since 1998, and, by some measures, have dropped since 2001. The CRU e-mails show scientists trying to hide this decline, to give one detail—I don’t have room in this column to detail the extent of CRU’s shenanigans, nor could I tell the story as well as others, so please read this “Editor’s Page” online for links (see below).
This doesn’t necessarily mean manmade global warming is disproven. But it does deflate the certainty and moral righteousness of the Al Gores and the IPCCs of the world. At Copenhagen and in Congress, politicians have proposed massive disruptions to our economies and lifestyles in the name of halting global warming. It turns out they’ve been doing so, at least partly, with books that have been cooked more than the planet.
Be sure to read all of Napier’s cri de coeur, but he gets one thing wrong in this statement that his commenters immediately flagged. It isn’t up to skeptics to disprove AGW. It’s up to scientists to prove it. Pointing out that the data has been hidden, destroyed, manipulated, and misrepresented by the so-called scientists running this industry shows that it’s not only not yet proven, but that its advocates apparently knew they couldn’t prove it scientifically. Otherwise, why bother with the deceit and dishonesty?
AGW advocates have axes to grind, not the least of which is finding excuses for fat research grants and excuses for statist control of energy production and economies around the world. Copenhagen dissolved into a shakedown racket by developing nations using the guilt of industrialized nations as a means for reparations and redistribution of wealth. It’s the kind of racket that journalists should be exposing, not participating in it. Napier’s message should be read by journalists throughout the world.
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