UN Officials Lied About Melting Glaciers to Win Hundreds of Thousands in Grant Money
Sunday, January 24, 2010, 8:19 PM
Jim Hoft
International junk scientists lied to get money for their projects. The junk scientists at the United Nations lied about melting Himalayan glaciers to secure hundreds of thousands of pounds in grant money.
The chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Rajendra Pachauri’s Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion’s share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers.
It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus. The revelation comes just a week after The Sunday Times highlighted serious scientific flaws in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on the likely impacts of global warming.
The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 – an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report.
The Telegraph reported: Last week, the IPCC, led by its increasingly controversial chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, was forced to issue an unprecedented admission: the statement in its 2007 report that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 had no scientific basis, and its inclusion in the report reflected a “poor application” of IPCC procedures.
Let's get this in perspective. Does anyone seriously doubt that big oil is not funding some of the research and financing some of those speaking out denying climate change? Surely we know that 20 years ago the scientists arguing that tobacco smoking was harmless were in the payroll of the tobacco companies. Has the world changed so much?
ReplyDeleteSo some of the scientists speaking out for climate change have been found to be dishonest. Does this mean all scientists warning about climate change are dishonest? Is this proof that there is nothing to be concerned about regarding climate change? I get the impression that because some of the scientists warning about climate change have been found to be less than reliable, by implication now all of the scientists denying that climate change is anything to worry about are totally reliable.
De facto, very few in this world are taking the scientists warning about climate change seriously. How many feet is the ocean going to rise, do they say? And what else? If the world's politicians and the people who elect them, really believed the climate change warnings, we would be seeing massive policies to turn things around. We're seeing hardly anything. So in fact, the climate change deniers are winning at this time.
This being the case, why should we be concerned if a few scientists, who are losing anyway, are found to be dishonest. Nothing will (or would) change except that a few $100,000 get spent differently. Of much greater concern to all of us must be if the deniers are dishonest or wrong, for no other reason than that they are determining policy at this time.
Further to my earlier comment, here is a bit of philosophy 101. If you are familiar with it, forgive me.
ReplyDeleteOption 1: We follow the climate change deniers
Scenario 1a: They are right. Logically this is great. From the point of view of our life on earth, this would also probably [but not necessarily] be the best scenario.
Scenario 1b: They are wrong. Logically, this is an error. From the point of view of our life on earth, this would be the worst possible outcome.
Option 2: We follow the climate change alarmists and make very substantial changes (that is we go way beyond changing our light bulbs to fluorescent).
Scenario 2a: They are right. Logically this is great. From the point of view of our life on earth, we are saved from disaster.
Scenario 2b: They are wrong. Logically this is an error. From the point of view of our life on earth, we don't know how this error would affect us, simply because we have not been there. Certainly there would be winners and losers as a result of the adjustments, but it is by no means certain that life for the average person would be worse.
So for the rational person [the person not driven by ideology, the person who has not already made up his/her mind) is only peripherally concerned that the evidence supporting option 2 above, may be corrupted, and that for two reasons: 1) as a planet we are not following option 2 anyway, and 2) were we to change to option 2, even because of corrupted evidence (and no reason to believe that the preponderance of evidence is corrupt) there is no certainty that scenario 2b would be bad.
On the other hand, if we continue to follow option 1, and end up at scenario 1b, the result is disaster.
So the rational person has much reason to be concerned about the reliability of the evidence suggesting that human induced climate change is nothing to be concerned about. Our very survival depends on the reliability of that evidence.
Do you agree?
I see two flaws in using the Prisoner's Dilemma.
ReplyDelete1. Using this philosophy, why don’t we raise taxes and build a trillion dollar shield to protect us from an asteroid that just may come? The asteroid deniers sure would look dumb if we get hit and we don’t build it. Obviously this is a bit of an extreme case, but perhaps an example closer to your heart, using the prisoners dilemma we should probably launch a first strike on Iran's nuclear facilities given the risk of the alternatives. Maybe I should not have driven to work today, as I would have looked quite foolish had I gotten into an accident. As I mentioned in a prior post, there is limited evidence that the world is on a fasttrack to collapse (as prices of commodities and survival rates are pointing to the opposite conclusion) and therefore I don’t see it justified in dramatically reshaping the global economy. I see it a kin to having told Moses to tell his people to stop having children as the world was about to end.
2. A bigger argument, is that restricting freedom in controlling resources appears to be counter-productive, as pointed out in prior posts. Therefore, I think limiting use, may in fact cause stewardship of resources to be worsened, as happens in most controlled economies.
I think you missed my point, which really was in the earlier comment.
ReplyDeleteWe now know with a fair degree of certainty that big tobacco knew about the harmful effects of smoking long before it became public knowledge, but they deliberately withheld that knowledge, and continue to advertise tobacco in countries with less regulatory capacity than Canada and the US. We also know that they had "scientists" on their payroll, whose job it was, not to discover and tell the truth, but undermine the credibility of those scientists who were trying to draw public attention to the health effects of tobacco use.
Can anyone seriously doubt that big oil has lobbyists in Washington and Ottawa. And what reason do we have to believe that they are lobbying in the interests of global humanity rather than big oil. In other words, you are becoming aware of some evidence that not everything with the climate change alarmists is on the up and up. Does this mean that you believe the science put forward by the climate change deniers is more reliable.
Be that as it may, I know of no politician who is taking the threat of climate change seriously. I can only speculate as to why. So I have much more reason to examine critically the science that is setting policy than the science that is having minimal effect on policy.