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Has anyone been as badly maligned as Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)?
In December, the Sunday Telegraph carried a long and prominent feature written by Christopher Booker and Richard North, titled: Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri.
The subtitle alleged that Pachauri has been “making a fortune from his links with ‘carbon trading’ companies”. The article maintained that the money made by Pachauri while working for other organisations “must run into millions of dollars”.
It described his outside interests as “highly lucrative commercial jobs”. It proposed that these payments caused a “conflict of interest” with his IPCC role. It also complained that we don’t know “how much we all pay him” as chairman of the IPCC.
The story (which has subsequently been removed from the Sunday Telegraph’s website) immediately travelled around the world. It was reproduced on hundreds of blogs. The allegations it contained were widely aired in the media and generally believed. For a while, no discussion of climate change or the IPCC appeared complete without reference to Pachauri’s “dodgy” business dealings and alleged conflicts of interest.
There was just one problem: the story was untrue.

rajendra Pachauri ipcc climate change conflict of interest sunday telegraph

Here we go again. The Manufactured Doubt Industrial Complex cries hoax after the IPCC retracts a bogus prediction about the melting of the Himalayan glaciers from a climate change report.

Let's nip this in the bud — the Himalayan glaciers are still melting.

Himalayan glaciers ipcc melting glacier melt glaciers hoax

Nice summary of the state of climate science since Bali

climate science copenhagen ipcc climate change

"The head of the international group leading the fight against climate change has accused countries of pushing science aside in favour of self-serving "political myopia" ahead of the vital Copenhagen summit."

rajendra Pachauri ipcc copenhagen summit climate change greenmonktv

Even if carbon emissions were cut to zero immediately, sea levels would continue to rise through the coming centuries, scientists say. A likely projection is an increase of up to five meters over 300 years.

sea level rise carbon emissions ipcc greenmonktv

The world's 100 largest companies are failing to meet scientific recommendations on cutting CO2 emissions to contain global warming, a new study released Tuesday warned.

"We are facing a Carbon Chasm," said the study by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), an independent organisation based in London.

"To cut emissions in developed economies by the required 80 percent by 2050, we need to see a minimum annual global reduction rate of 3.9 percent" per year, it said.

"However analysis of reduction targets from the Global 100 companies shows they are currently on track for an annual reduction of just 1.9 percent" per year.

carbon disclosure project co2 co2 emissions cdp ipcc greenmonktv

Trade tariffs in a House-passed bill to limit heat-trapping pollution could undermine US efforts to persuade developing countries to enter into a new global warming treaty, says IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri.

trade tariffs rajendra Pachauri ipcc us global warming treaty greenmonktv

A group of experts reporting to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has increased dramatically the figure it believes aviation contributes to climate change.

In a report published last month, the eight international scientists put aviation's total contribution -'radiative forcing' - in 2005 at 4.9%.

aviation radiative forcing climate change ipcc greenmonktv

The cost of tackling climate change will be paid for by benefits that would come from better energy security, employment and health, Rajendra Pachauri says ahead of major announcement on 2013 reports

ipcc rajendra Pachauri Climate Change cost energy security greenmonktv

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

global climate coalition climate change ipcc greenmonktv greenhouse gas co2

New research indicates that the ocean could rise in the next 100 years to a meter higher than the current sea level – which is three times higher than predictions from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC.

climate change ipcc sea level

The cream of the UK climate science community sat in stunned silence as Kevin Anderson pointed out that carbon emissions since 2000 have risen much faster than anyone thought possible, driven mainly by the coal-fuelled economic boom in the developing world. So much extra pollution is being pumped out, he said, that most of the climate targets debated by politicians and campaigners are fanciful at best, and "dangerously misguided" at worst.

In the jargon used to count the steady accumulation of carbon dioxide in the Earth's thin layer of atmosphere, he said it was "improbable" that levels could now be restricted to 650 parts per million (ppm).

co2 co2 emissions carbon dioxide 450ppm 350ppm 650ppm ipcc

If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.

So warned IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri last fall when the IPCC released its major multi-year report synthesizing our understanding of climate science. And remember Pachauri was handpicked by the Bush administration to replace the “alarmist” Bob Watson. It’s the facts that make scientists alarmists, not their politics

climate change ipcc co2 romm

sea level rise from all other melting ice and the expansion of seawater as the weather gets warmer over the next century would be somewhere between 2.6 feet (0.8 meter) and six feet (two meters)—or nearly twice as much as projected last year by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

sea level rise ipcc glacier glacier melt climate change global warming

"To what extent this dynamic response of the Laurentide ice sheet to past temperature change can be considered analogous to present and future reduction of the Greenland ice sheet remains unresolved," they say in an associated commentary. "But their work suggests that future reductions of the Greenland ice sheet on the order of one metre per century are not out of the question."

If Carlson's estimates are correct, they show that 2007 predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – a sea-level rise of between 18 centimetres and 59 cm by 2100 – are very conservative, as the IPCC acknowledged at the time.

greenland greenland ice sheet sea level rise climate change ipcc

As deforestation accelerates and grows ever more concentrated the consequences on climate change are even greater than previously thought. As reported in New Scientist:

Pristine temperate forest stores three times more carbon than currently estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and 60% more than plantation forests, according to research in Australia.

ipcc climate change

Tropical downpours are becoming more frequent and the trend seems worse than expected, bringing greater risks of flash floods, scientists said on Thursday.

"As the tropics warm are seeing an increased frequency in the heaviest rainfall," said Richard Allan of the University of Reading in England, who co-authored a study of tropical rains with Brian Soden of the University of Miami.

The satellite review of tropical rainstorms since the 1980s gave the first observational evidence to confirm computer models that predict more intense cloudbursts because of global warming stoked by human activities, they said.

climate change global warming tropical downpours ipcc