Carnegie suspended Pachauri grant

Despite Dr Pachauri's claims that his research institution TERI was being funded from a grant of $500,000 from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the money from one of America's leading and oldest charities had already been suspended by the time he announced the grant.

The announcement of the funding was made jointly at a prestigious press conference by Pachauri and the president of Iceland, Dr Ólafur Grímsson on 15 January of this year.

On the day, the TERI press release claimed that, "according to predictions of scientific merit they [the glaciers] may indeed melt away in several decades. This, in turn, will have implications for the entire water system of the sub-continent, with immediate effect on soil, water management, and the possibilities of food production."

"Looking at the unfolding scenario in the mountains and the immediate need for scientific collaboration and research on this issue," the release continued, "[the] University of Iceland in collaboration with The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) and the Carnegie Corporation of New York have joined hands to work in the fields of glaciology and soil science."

Although the release claimed that the collaboration, "will be funded primarily by the Carnegie Corporation of New York", the celebrations were a sham as, according to the Indian DNA news agency, no money had been given to either TERI or Grímsson's Global Centre.

This is confirmed by Susan King, vice president for public affairs at the corporation. "In September 2008, we approved a $500,000 grant to the Iceland -based Global Centre towards research on water-related security and humanitarian challenges to South Asia posed by the melting Himalayan glaciers. It was a one-time grant," she said.

"No funds have been paid to the centre as the grantee (the centre) told us not to send it because of political and economic challenges facing Iceland," she added.

No timescale is given by King, but from a separate e-mail sent to us from Carnegie official George Soule, we learn that the grant was suspended shortly after it had been approved, i.e., well before TERI's January launch. The Corporation has not answered queries about whether the grant will be reinstated.

The DNA agency notes that, "Clearly, the US charity's money hasn't been squandered on a Himalayan blunder." King declined to comment, or get dragged into the climate row, the agency says, but did the centre and Carnegie smell a rat? The grant never happened despite being approved in September 2008.

It's terribly odd for a receiver of a grant to turn down generous funding "unless, of course, the centre felt the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 was far-fetched," the agency concludes.

However, there is more. On Sunday, we noted that an emergency workshop of glacier experts had been convened on 28 December by UNEP, the sponsoring organisation for the IPCC – specifically to discuss the melting glacier claim.

Then, the considered response was that the claim was unsupported by science and that the IPCC conclusion "may have to be revised". Yet Dr Pachauri, head of the IPCC – who must have known of the conclusion – did nothing until 20 January, three days after it had been raised by The Sunday Times and five days after his TERI press launch.

Had the controversy broken earlier, it would clearly have been embarrassing to Drs Pachauri and Grímsson but was there a more sinister motive? With the Carnegie funds having been suspended, was Pachauri keeping quiet in order to avoid the very controversy he feared might happen – knowing that a major press row might end any chances of reinstatement?

Do we have a cover-up here?

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

Glaciergate – still a long way from the truth

Evidence is building that IPCC claim that Himalayan glaciers were going to melt by 2035 was not only a deliberate fraud, but efforts were made to cover it up when the figure was challenged.

Some of the pieces of the jigsaw are already there in the public domain, starting with Ben Webster's piece in The Times on Saturday – which we analysed in this post. This made it clear that Rajendra Pachauri was appraised of what he now claims was a "mistake" by an Indian science journalist, last November.

But the story is taken further by Jonathan Leake in The Sunday Times today, under the heading: "Panel ignored warnings on glacier error". There, he reports that the leaders of the IPCC had known for weeks and probably months about the "error" and had even convened private conferences to discuss it.

Although he refers to the last of such conferences, which was hosted by TERI in Delhi last month (28 December), there is no mention of the fact that this was organised by the United Nations Environment Programme, the sponsoring body for the IPCC itself.

Although it was a pre-planned meeting, it turned rapidly into a crisis "workshop" of international glaciologists, which decided that, "the IPCC conclusion that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 may have to be revised ... ", adding that: "there appears to be no scientific foundation for the IPCC's prediction for the year 2035."

Although Rajedra Pachauri is not listed as an attendee, his senior glaciologist, Syed Hasnain was there, and so was professor Murari Lal, one of the lead authors of the glaciers section of the IPCC report. In all, there were fifteen TERI personnel at the workshop, including Hasnain, and TERI University is cited as a collaborator in the production of the subsequent report (cover illustrated).

Given that the meeting was actually held in the TERI offices, with so many TERI personnel there, it is inconceivable that Pachauri – director general of TERI and chairman of the IPCC – was not appraised of its findings, especially given the importance of the issue.

Apart from the implications for the IPCC, what may of course have been preoccupying Pachauri was that, on 15 January, there was to be a high-profile launch of the collaborative programme on glacier research, funded by the Carnegie Corporation, at which the president of Iceland, Dr Ólafur Grímsson, was to be the star guest.

It takes little imagination to surmise that Pachauri would not want to be embroiled in a controversy over glaciers with such a prestigious event in the offing – especially, as we see from Carnegie grant statement that the research project was based on Hasnain's false claim that glaciers "will vanish within forty years as a result of global warming … resulting in widespread water shortages."

This brings us to Hansain himself, who was leader of the TERI glaciology team. Building on our work on the timeline of Hasnain's claims, Leake makes it abundantly clear that not only were Hasnain's claims false, but he knew them to be so.

In particular, as party to the Sagamatha study which was concluded in June 2004, Hasnain had signed up to the conclusions that suggestions the region's glaciers might soon melt "would seem unfounded".

That Hansain persisted in his false claims, right up until September 2009, and then sought to defend the IPCC claim in the face of Raina's report published in November 2009, is to say the very least, perverse – more so when the leader of the Sagarmatha survey, Gwyn Rees, had re-emphasised in May 2009 that, "It is unlikely that all glaciers will vanish by 2035!"

With Hasnain by then employed by Dr Pachauri's TERI, and reliant on grant-funded work from the Carnegie Corporation and the EU "High Noon" programme – which had been initiated on the basis of Hasnain's false 2035 claim – there is a very obvious motive for Dr Hasnain to keep the controversy out of the limelight.

Thus it was that only after the falsehood had been "outed" by Leake on 17 January, that Pachauri began to acknowledge that there was a problem, but then very grudgingly. Two days after the Leake report, all he would concede was: "Theoretically, let's say we slipped up on one number ...".

With Hasnain claiming he was "misquoted" – which was never the case - and Pachauri maintaining that the inclusion of the figure was a mistake, this has all the hallmarks of a clumsy cover-up which continues to this day.

Exposing the Pachauri lie is lead author professor Murari Lal who told the UNEP workshop back in December, "that it was wrong to assume, as has been done in sections of media that the year 2035 had crept in the report by mistake" (see inset, above right).

Yet even to this day, the IPCC is still talking about an "error", thus perpetrating the lie, and concealing from the public that false information was deliberately included in the IPCC report. "Glaciergate", it seems, still has a long way to go before we get to the truth.

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

Pachauri: the real story ...

Booker reports in his column "a further dramatic twist to what has inevitably been dubbed 'Glaciergate'".

Partly rehearsed in our previous story, Booker thus brings to a wider audience the remarkable tale of Dr Pachauri who has distanced himself from the IPCC's baseless claim about vanishing glaciers yet is now employing the very man who made those claims.

The piece serves, therefore, as an admirable summary of the multiple posts we have written on the issue, including a reminder that this issue is far more important globally than is indicated by the coverage in the Western media.

To understand why the future of Himalayan glaciers should arouse such peculiar passion, Booker writes, one must recall why they have long been a central icon in global warming campaigners' propaganda. Everything that polar bears have been to the West, the ice of the Himalayas has been – and more – to the East.

This is because, as Mr Gore emphasised in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth, the vast Himalayan ice sheet feeds seven of the world's major river systems, thus helping to provide water to 40 percent of the world's population.

The IPCC's shock prediction in its 2007 report that the likelihood of the glaciers "disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high" thus had huge impact in India and other Asian countries, and it is precisely this statement that the IPCC has now been forced to disown.

Booker also reminds us that last November, Dr Raina, the country's most senior glaciologist, published a report for the Indian government showing that the rate of retreat of Himalayan glaciers had not increased in the past 50 years and that the IPCC's predictions were recklessly alarmist.

He recalls that this provoked the furious reaction from Dr Pachauri that tarred Dr Raina's report as "arrogant" and "voodoo science". Only weeks later came the devastating revelation that the IPCC's own prediction had no scientific foundation.

It was not until last week, when The Sunday Times put the issue firmly in the public domain that RK Pachauri finally began to acknowledge that there was a problem with his IPCC report. But, in typical style, he chose to disown his own report, saying that the offending paragraphs were "the work of independent authors" They're responsible, he said – he had "absolutely no responsibility" for the blunder.

But, now that Pachauri has suffered the humiliation of having to admit that his report was wrong all along, we see revealed the part played in this fiasco by a senior member of his own TERI staff. It appears, concludes Booker, that what we may soon be looking at here is not just "Glaciergate" but "Pachaurigate".

More on Watts up with that?

PACHAURI THREAD

Pauchauri: EU caught by "glaciergate" hype

Both The Sunday Telegraph (Booker column) and The Sunday Times reveal that the IPCC was not the only organisation caught out by Dr Hasnain's spurious claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. The EU fell for it as well, without checking its scientific authenticity.

Driven by this claim, officials from the EU's multi-billion euro "Framework 7" research programme were so alarmed at the prospect of a rapid glacial melt that they decided to "call for proposals" in the area of Himalayan glaciers retreat, describing the proposed project as "a topic of high scientific and societal importance!"

This was revealed at a seminar on 13 May 2009 when Anastasios Kentarchos, a senior official from the EU commission's Environment Directorate, DG – Research - made a presentation (see frame pictured above) , which refers to Dr Pachauri's fourth assessment report for the IPCC, specifically citing the 2035 date.

The presentation was given during the opening session of an Open Science Seminar (pictured below) organised to discuss the "Future of Water Resources in India under a Changing Climate".


At the seminar, which was hosted by R K Pachauri's institute, TERI, and held in its New Delhi office location, Pachauri was also a keynote speaker and Dr Syed Hasnain was also believed to be present. The seminar was intended to kick-off the EU funded High Noon project aimed at researching the effects of the glaciers melting.

Nor was this the first time Dr Hasnain's claim has been adopted by the EU. In its "State of the Art" webpage introducing the "High Noon" project, it references the same 2005 WWF document used in the IPCC forth assessment report. The webpage notes, in respect of the glacier melt, that: "Reviews from the region suggest that the timescales are short, may be the 2040s... ", citing: "World Wildlife Fund 2005".

Six days after Anastasios Kentarchos's presentation, the EU formally announced - again in New Delhi – the start of the €3 million project, revealing that TERI was to be a beneficiary of the funding.

This may not have come as a surprise to Dr Pachauri. A resident at 160 Golf Links, in New Delhi's "millionaires' row", the office of the EU commission in Delhi is situated at 65 Golf Links – making them practically next door neighbours.

At the time of the announcement and for nearly two years, Dr Hasnain – the originator of the 2035 claim – had been working for Dr Pachauri and was to lead the TERI glaciology unit implementing the EU-funded research.

TERI had already been awarded a major part of a $500,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, also to research the effects of melting glaciers, although this was not to be formally announced until 15 January this year.

As with the EU project, reference was made to Dr Hasnain's claim, with the grant award citation reading: "One authoritative study reported that most of the glaciers in the region “will vanish within forty years as a result of global warming…resulting in widespread water shortages." Again, as with the EU project, Dr Hasnain was to lead the research programme.

The issue of Pachauri using IPCC claims as a means of attracting funding to investigate melting glaciers was first raised by this blog on 17 December, his financial interest largely explaining his hostile reaction to criticism of Dr Hasnain's claim retailed by his own report.

Since the extent of the funding has become clearer, and the link with Hasnain have fully emerged, the response from both Pachauri and Hasnain has been denial and contradiction.

Now, with two heavyweight newspapers pitching in, the pair may find it harder to sustain their denials of what is very clearly documented evidence of conflict of interest and, on Dr Pachauri's part, a misuse of public office. His refusal to resign looks thinner by the minute.

PACHAURI THREAD

Lost it!

With the blogosphere aflame with the IPCC's climbdown over "glaciergate", and the story dominating the environmental news, Moonbat thinks this is the most important thing to write about.

PACHAURI THREAD