Climate Conversation Group

A guest writer inspires thought.

Rupert Wyndham, 12 December 2010

We now have the details of a proposed stitch-up at Cancun. $100bn, it is intended by 2020, should be levied from the taxpayers of “rich” nations to help poor ones adjust to the manifestly and absurdly extravagant alleged effects of climate change. The outcome of any such a fund actually being collected and distributed is predictable, of course.

Unimaginably vast sums will go to enriching the dictators of such countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa but elsewhere too, no doubt, as well as the so-called environmentalist movement in the West. A few years hence there will be little, if any, measurable evidence of investment in “measures to save the planet”.

It is illuminating to recall that Kenya now acknowledges that 43% of its annual receipts of grant aid are syphoned off into sleaze. It is also salutary to recall that WWF now expects to reap revenues of $2bn plus from such a “world fund”.

Is it too fanciful to suggest that the quid pro quo for the enrichment of the third world classe politique is an undisclosed agreement for a percentage back-wash into the Lichtenstein bank accounts of our own political protagonists, amongst whose number in the UK, may well be the heir to the throne as well as individual propagandists at the BBC and not forgetting other dedicated quangos, for example?

Will they get away with it? I don’t think so – after all, where’s the money to come from? And let’s not forget that there’s an ocean of difference between promise and performance. Still, if personal enrichment is actually the real undisclosed name of the game, we may have to anticipate interesting times.

Just a thought – ignoble, I know, but then we live in a funny old world, do we not?

Rajendra Pachauri – is science his real concern?

From the New York Post, September 1, 2010.

If this keeps up, no one’s going to trust any scientists.

The global-warming establishment took a body blow this week, as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change received a stunning rebuke from a top-notch independent investigation.

For two decades, the IPCC has spearheaded efforts to convince the world’s governments that man-made carbon emissions pose a threat to the global temperature equilibrium — and to civilisation itself. IPCC reports, collated from the work of hundreds of climate scientists and bureaucrats, are widely cited as evidence for the urgent need for drastic action to “save the planet.”

But the prestigious InterAcademy Council, an independent association of “the best scientists and engineers worldwide” (as the group’s own web site puts it) formed in 2000 to give “high-quality advice to international bodies,” has finished a thorough review of IPCC practices — and found them badly wanting.

False claims, no evidence

For example, the IPCC’s much-vaunted Fourth Assessment Report claimed in 2007 that Himalayan glaciers were rapidly melting, and would possibly be gone by the year 2035. The claim was actually false — yet the IPCC cited it as proof of man-made global warming. Read more… »

The shrewdly-woven fabric of the great climate change narrative has begun to tear. Remarkably, its resistance to tearing is proving non-existent. The rifts widen daily as exaggerations are piled upon naked lies and climate theories and snake-oil remedies are dissolved to expose the venal money-making schemes that lie at their root.

The IPCC is doomed, Pachauri faces removal

As much as I would like to focus on local facets of the climate change dreamland it is nevertheless impossible to ignore the continuing revelations from abroad that are tearing at the fabric of the “Grand Narrative”, to use Philip Stott’s term at the Clamour Of The Times.

These tectonic changes will demand alterations to or even cancellation of our own ETS and other responses to “global warming”, so we need to know about them. New Zealand needs a dialogue to debate the implications. Read more… »

UPDATE 1 Jan 19, 3:54 pm: I’ve just come across Roger Pielke Jr’s view on this. He’s disgusted.

Dr Richard North, at Eureferendum, explains how a mistaken claim from about five years ago made its way into the latest IPCC “summary of the latest science” on climate change, has been thoroughly discredited and disproven, and yet still allows Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman and public front of the IPCC, to make a lot of money from it.

We’re constantly told that the IPCC reports “are put together by 2500 scientists” but so what, if they miss this kind of thing?

How can we trust this man and the alarming climate predictions he gives us?

The Times of India, under an odd-sounding headline, carry the following story on their web site today:

Pachauri-led TERI under UK scanner

LONDON: The British government is to carry out due diligence on New Delhi-based The Energy Research Institute following a local newspaper’s relentless campaign against the organization and its director-general, Rajendra Pachauri, who is also the IPCC chairman.

A British Department for International Development statement said, ‘‘As is routine, DFID is undertaking a full Institutional Assessment of TERI as part of our due diligence process.’’

The Sunday Telegraph’s persistence seems to have ‘‘triggered the routine’’.

The paper attacked DFID and its secretary of state (cabinet minister) Douglas Alexander for presenting 10 million pounds of British tax-payers money to TERI in Delhi last September. In its most recent piece, titled ‘‘The curious case of the expanding environmental group with falling income’’, it once again questioned TERI and Pachauri’s probity.

It alleged, ‘‘He (Pachauri) enjoys a lavish lifestyle; his Delhi home is in the Golf Links area, the most expensive stretch of residential real estate in India, and he is famous for his $1,000 suits.’’ The piece also insinuated that while the registered charity, TERI Europe’s business in the past six years had increased, its published turnover had decreased.

When ‘‘The Sunday Telegraph’’ reportedly put it to one of its two directors, Dr Ritu Kumar, a south London resident, that the body’s income and expenditure in recent years were both much greater than the figures it declared, she is said to have admitted anomalies in the accounts. Teri Europe’s accountants have now been instructed to produce a revised version.

Let us hope it achieves a frank disclosure of the financial affairs of arguably the most important figure in the climate change scandal. With the reputation of the IPCC taking almost daily hits on multiple fronts, it’s little wonder recent polls show fewer New Zealanders now worried by “global warming”.

Pachauri – climate prophet for profit

Is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), dealing with us (his global constituents, as it were) honestly?

Richard North, in a blog piece called Pachauri: How much is this man getting?, says:

What we are seeing here … is an interesting modus vivendi — three different payments to support the chairman of the IPCC, yet each payment is made by a different organisation to a different organisation — one in the US, one in the UK and one in India. No one knows what the other is doing — except Pachauri, of course.

Why were these payments made in such complex fashion? Apparently his United Nations salary is not publicly disclosed — why not?

On January 6, 2010, in an article entitled Pachauri: the smoking gun, Dr Richard North describes how

TERI Europe was engaged in the production of a report for which it must have attracted funding in the order of £70,000 and incurred considerable expense, yet it shows an income of £9,000 and an expenditure of £5,000.

Even if there is a substantial discount on the SI2 report, it is simply not credible that TERI Europe could have operated that year with an income so low, or spent so little. On the face of it, we are very much closer to showing that this organisation has indeed been guilty of false accounting, and misleading the Charity Commission. Read more… »

Andy Reisinger – powerful global links to climate profits

Dr Andrew Reisinger, Senior Research Fellow, New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute (CCRI), sits at the right hand of God. The god, that is, of the IPCC — Dr Rajendra Pachauri. Andy is head of the Technical Support Unit for the Synthesis Report group of the IPCC, and from that exalted position controls what the world’s national leaders get to know about climate change.

For he was responsible to his “core group” co-author Rajendra Pachauri for co-ordinating the drafting of the Synthesis Report for the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). The SR is “the concluding summary of the IPCC’s most recent assessment of our current knowledge on climate change,” as Andy’s cv puts it.

That sounds like proper influence to me — real, transformative power. For what comes out of the IPCC’s Assessment Report (or more particularly the summary of it) goes straight into the ears of national leaders around the globe and they will act upon it. They don’t read the actual reports, so they won’t spot the differences between them and the summary. Neither will they fault the summary for themselves, because they are not scientists.

So they are necessarily at the mercy of the authors (or manipulators) of the Summary Report. Much has been said elsewhere about the politically-motivated alterations that were made to many of the IPCC reports. The reports are meant to represent the best of current scientific knowledge, but in practice they are watered down, uncertainties are grossly understated, certainty is claimed where it doesn’t exist and what the scientists said has even been reversed — without their approval.

The mother of all conflicts — of interest

Read more… »