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. . .http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7014203.ece
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.
A journalist working for Science had told Dr Pachauri several times late last year that glaciologists had refuted the IPCC claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Dr Pachauri refused to address the problem, saying: "I don’t have anything to add on glaciers." He suggested that the error would not be corrected until 2013 or 2014, when the IPCC next reported.
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 U.N. climate change body manufactured evidence that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 in order to justify adoption of an international climate change treaty. They only confessed to their error after the story made headlines, but no one resigned and no one was fired.
When radical environmental groups such as Greenpeace start questioning the validity, honesty and integrity of international climate science, you know something fishy is going on.
By the way - - kudos to Greenpeace. It should be every political and social movement's duty to police the ethics of its membership, but few ever do it. Greenpeace did.
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