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Pachauri under Pressure: Quotes of the Day Special

Cross-posted by Daniel Cressey on The Great Beyond

2035 picture.bmpThe row over an erroneous claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035 shows no sign of abating. Soon we’ll be calling it ‘2035-gate’.

“I am not going to stand down, I am going to stand up.”

Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, tells the BBC he will not quit.

“The IPCC’s shortfalls are illustrated with the behaviour of Pachauri, its chair since 2002. … Without significant institutional reform, the IPCC, and climate science as a whole, risks more than just bad press. It risks losing its credibility and trust.”

Climate researchers Richard Tol, Roger Pielke and Hans von Storch demand the resignation of Pachauri and wholesale reform of the IPCC in an opinion piece in Spiegel.

“We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature”. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.”

Murari Lal, a lead author of the IPCC report’s Asia section, discusses the 2035 claim (Mail on Sunday).

“It has to be accepted, it was a mistake, it was embarrassing, and the IPCC has to do better. The good thing is that people point to it and it’s uncovered.”

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and an author of previous IPCC reports, tells the Dot Earth blog that lessons can be learned from ‘2035-gate’.

Comments

  1. Report this comment

    Jesús Rosino said:

    In my view, the problem with Pachauri is not that there was such a mistake, but that, he publicly dismissed a study that got the science right (retrat not abnormal) without any research, in a field that he should know about.

    I think that’s an unacceptable attitude for the chairman (who is supposed to be a scienteist) of a highly respected body such as the IPCC. He shouldn’t wait for the social pressure to resign.

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    David B. Benson said:

    Good lord. Will all this unproductive criticsm never cease?

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    Hank Roberts said:

    Pachauri, who was for the TAR the IPCC’s vice-chair under Watson, was the oil companies’ choice to replace Watson; is it a surprise he has connections to the industry all of a sudden?

    Gasp!

    From:

    https://gadfly.igc.org/liberal/fantasyland.htm

    The ExxonMobil memo to Bush “to orchestrate the ouster of the IPCC Chair, Robert Watson and replacing this eminent atmospheric scientists with an Indian economist, Rejandra Pachauri.”

    https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=https://www.nrdc.org/media/docs/020403.pdf

    Discussion and links:

    https://www.climatesciencewatch.org/index.php/csw/details/maccracken-exxon-letter/

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