Inside the Climate Bunker

Three years ago, Rajendra K. Pachauri was accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N.'s climate science panel. Now the IPCC head is under fire from critics for a catalogue of recent embarrassments: his initial kneejerk defense of the "Climategate" emails (Pachauri first questioned the motives of those who had hacked into the University of East Anglia's email system, then said there was "virtually no possibility" that IPCC findings were impacted), the fight he picked with the Indian environmental minister when the latter questioned certain data on glacier melt within India (Pachauri called the government report's "voodoo science"), and the steamy soft-core novel, Return to Almora, he released last month (somewhere between memoir and fantasy, it features the sexual exploits of a 60-something globetrotting climate expert, and has scandalized an Indian public not accustomed to its masturbating scenes and erotic explicitness).

Few stars have risen and fallen so quickly as Pachauri's, who has gone from being an international climate hero to subject of increasing ridicule at home and abroad. Pachauri, an economist and former railroad engineer from a small town in the Himalayan foothills of north India, assumed his position at the helm of the IPCC in 2002. At the time, he had the enthusiastic backing of the Bush administration, which had grown tired of fielding industry complaints about his predecessor Robert Watson and hoped (wrongly, it turned out) that Pachauri would prove less vocal in his calls for carbon-reduction efforts.

But even as his credentials and honors stacked up -- from the government of France anointing him an "Officier de la legion d'honneur" to GQ India naming him 2009's "Global Indian of the Year" (FP even named him a "top global thinker" last year) -- Pachauri couldn't quite discipline his tongue. Or perhaps he didn't care what impression his verbal zingers left. In 2008, he told the Chicago Tribune: "I tell people I was born a Hindu who believes in reincarnation. It will take me the next six lives to neutralize my carbon footprint. There's no way I can do it in one lifetime."

But he attracted the most attention for barbs directed at his critics, calling those who've questioned IPCC reports "flat-earthers" -- "they are indulging in is skulduggery of the worst kind," he told the Financial Times -- and generally bristling at the prospect of unwanted scrutiny, without providing clear answers to valid questions about his stewardship. ("My conscience is clear," he announced to the New York Times this week.) But while Pachauri's larger-than-life persona and propensity for conducting himself as though beyond reproach catches attention, these characteristics don't in and of themselves defame the organization he heads -- as much as global-warming deniers are happy to seize upon any opportunity to poke holes in climate science in general.

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INKMAN

12:22 AM ET

February 10, 2010

RK Pachauri - Incompetent and unprofessional

For several months, Mr. Pachauri created a state of panic among Indians by spreading inaccurate data about the rate at which the Himalayan glaciers are melting.

Whether the exaggeration was done intentionally or not, fact remains that Mr. Pachauri repeatedly ridiculed Government of India surveys and at the same time, stuck by the 2035 figure without double checking its source.

Mr. Pachauri should go. And I am saying this not only because he is incompetent and unprofessional, but also because the longer he stays, the more harm he will do to the anti-global warming campaign.

OMNOLOGOS

7:07 AM ET

Deniers?

Who is this Christina Larson and what prevents her from understanding that there is an enormous range of opinions between IPCC True Believers like Pachauri and those that negate any validity to the physics of global warming?

Would Foreign Policy accept an article where all the people that don't agree with President Obama were lumped into a "fascist" category?

MOHAIR.SAM

10:17 AM ET

Hear, hear

Larson's text is so loaded with nasty invective this article isn't worth much. To wit:

"...as much as global-warming deniers are happy to seize upon any opportunity to poke holes in climate science in general." ("Poke holes"? It's called SCIENCE, not religion. Falsifiability is one of the tenets of the scientific method. The back-and-forth between those who advance a hypothesis and those who test it is how science is supposed to work. That it consistently hasn't worked this way in the elevation of climate hypotheses to religious dogma has concerned many actual climate scientists whose skepticism has been derided and mocked by the likes of Ms. Larson.)

"But with the fate of the planet in the balance, that's not good enough." (Again, assuming facts not in evidence. We just automatically assume that a clearly flawed process, and the anti-scientific methods revealed by the leaked e-mails, and the travesty that was the Mann graph, and the very flawed data collection methods uncovered by Anthony Watts and his contributors, plus everything A Balanced View has listed, etc., etc., somehow add up to "the fate of the planet in balance." No, sorry. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. The warmists must show that human activity has such a profound forcing effect on climate that all other forcings are effectively dwarfed by it. Thus far, the record isn't promising.

MICHAEL OHARA

11:31 AM ET

Skeptic to Denialist spectrum

Who is this Omnologos and what prevents him or her from understanding that the sort of vicious attacks made on Pachauri are made by people on the rabid denialist end of the range of opinions about climate change? Legitimate scientists certainly disagree about process and procedure - it's what "peer review" is all about and it takes place over many years in the scientific press (not blogs or the mass market press). Does the source cited by Ms. Larson regarding an estimate of 2350 have a greater validity than the 2035 number? That debate will be held in the peer reviewed literature and will not be "proved" absolutely until at least 2035. These same anonymous commentators express great upset about the perceived insult of being called a "denier" while freely throwing out their own pet expressions - "True Believer, Warmist, Alarmist, Propagandist, and Fraud" (and these are the nicer ones).
A denier is someone who repeatedly presents unsubstantiated claims and outright lies about the science of climate and the people who work in the field. When these claims are found to have no basis and the lies are rebutted, they change the subject and duck (See Monkton's "debate" with Monbiot) or simply keep repeating the already debunked claims, something very easy to do in the on-line universe. An example of the latter is "Mohair" who blithely tosses off a claim that the hacked emails indicate fraud and that Dr. Mann's graphs are "a travesty". These are easy to say but can't be backed up - analysis of the emails shows no fraud and Mann's graphs are supported by data from several other unrelated sources. That Mohair's statements are so easily disproved is of no concern to him. He will not suffer from embarrassment and his reputation will not be sullied (as he has none). He will make the same claims again and again.

A skeptic, by contrast, is someone with integrity who asks questions to better understand and challenges proponents of one idea or another to support their contentions. A skeptic may be won over to a position if the information and presentation is convincing - a denier will never be; they are bound to their identity.

Larson's review of the tempest over the mistake made (in presenting a particular date for something to occur in the future) actually gives a lot of space to those wishing to vent about how awful they think the errors are and how this gives them adequate reason to call for the administrator's resignation. A rational person reviewing the entire IPCC body of work will see these errors as what Mr. Field says they are - an outlier source picked up by one of the authors and which made it through the review process.

BLUE13326

9:11 AM ET

No point in reading what

No point in reading what might be an interesting article when you use the loaded absurd term of 'deniers' to label those who disagree with an unsettled area of science.

J BAUSTIAN

1:22 PM ET

It really is a worthless article

The comments were worth reading. The article? not so much. The author focuses on one well-documented falsehood from the IPCC, wishes they had more professional spin-meisters on the staff to refute the challenges, but ignores the dozens of other examples where the "peer-reviewed science" turns out to come from a World Wildlife Fund magazine or some similar source.

BILL99

9:48 AM ET

February 11, 2010

Not unpaid

It is not accurate to call the scientists working for the IPCC unpaid volunteers; in most cases their salaries are being paid by their companies while they work on the IPCC reports, and all expenses are paid as well. The scientists who made the mistakes mentioned here got close to a million bucks for their efforts.

SDCOUGAR

12:09 PM ET

FP's Agenda and Fatal Flaw

Your article's jargon of "global-warming deniers" is nowhere matched by references to 'global warming hysterics"--perhaps because the author appears to be one, thus her concluding sentence: "Confusion, not orchestrated bias or, as some have asserted, greed, seems the most likely cause of recent slipups. But with the fate of the planet in the balance..., ."

Of course, "the fate of the planet," that is why the 2035 'slip up' occurred [not because of bureaucratic bungling]. As has been reported [which shows you how much homework the FP writer did], the 2035 Glacier disaster was included for political, not scientific purposes.

"Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, 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."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245636/Glacier-scientists-says-knew-data-verified.html#ixzz0dUx6pwXe

12:20 PM ET

quote

"Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research...."

8:33 PM ET

Glaciergate – still a long way from the truth

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/glaciergate-still-long-way-from-truth.html

"Prof. Murari Lai…noted that it was wrong to assume, as has been done in sections of the media, that the year 2035 had crept in the report by mistake."

JEM

1:43 PM ET

I almost pity the writers...

...who try to play apologist for the IPCC, when you pedal backward that rapidly the chain invariably falls off.

By the time you've thrown together a piece trying to isolate the latest error of fact or judgment in AR4, another half-dozen have turned up. By the time you've quoted some Eminent Scientist on the solidity of the science, the blogs are buzzing with the latest evidence of the warmists' agenda-driven adjustment of historical temperature data.

Back to square one, folks. We need an agreed structure for what a global planetary temperature database should look like and how to map the existing, vastly imperfect historical temperature data into it with acceptable accuracy, because at this point we don't even have a reliable temperature record that can stand up to minimal scrutiny.

Foreign Policy Magazine

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Inside the Climate Bunker

How global-warming deniers are running circles around the U.N.'s top climate body.

BY CHRISTINA LARSON | FEBRUARY 9, 2010

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