Angry in the Great White North

Let's do a quick review of the scandals engulfing the forces of the global warming religion:

• Key figures in and out of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia are alleged to have conspired to suppress the publication of critical research, and to destroy raw data demand by skeptics hoping to do their own analysis.
• Key authors of the IPCC deliberately allowed a grossly inflated estimate for the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers to be included in the IPCC's official 2007 report in order to pressure politicians into action.
• The estimates regarding the impact of global warming on the Amazon basin came from reports from an environmentalist, not from peer-reviewed scientific papers.
• The NOAA in the US has been accused of cherry-picking temperature data in such a way as to skew the data to show warming.

This is a slim overview.  There have been others revelations, but a key commonality is that the head of the IPCC, Raj Pachauri, is not directly involved in any of these.  In fact, the first and last ones had nothing to do with the IPCC directly.  He is on record as trying to minimize the importance of these revelations, but except for using intemperate language (practitioners of "voodoo science", he called them) when referring to the people who originally (and correctly) called the predicted Himalayan glacier melting date ridiculous, he didn't directly make these mistakes.

He has been called out as being in conflict of interest because of his personal business dealings, but then with conflict of interest, it's always hard to say, for certain, that Pachauri would have acted any differently if he did not have those business dealings (and that he would not have acted any differently is, indeed, his contention).

Hey, I think this is plenty enough to get him fired, or to demand his resignation, but at least his defenders didn't have to rationalize Pachauri's actions.  They just had to say he was too far removed from the bad acts to reasonably hold him responsible.

That has changed, now that Pachauri has been accused of deliberately lying:

The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.

Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.

The IPCC's report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.

Dr Pachauri, who played a leading role at the summit, corrected the error last week after coming under media pressure. He told The Times on January 22 that he had only known about the error for a few days. He said: "I became aware of this when it was reported in the media about ten days ago. Before that, it was really not made known. Nobody brought it to my attention. There were statements, but we never looked at this 2035 number."

Asked whether he had deliberately kept silent about the error to avoid embarrassment at Copenhagen, he said: "That's ridiculous. It never came to my attention before the Copenhagen summit. It wasn't in the public sphere."

However, a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error. He said that Dr Pachauri had replied: "I don't have anything to add on glaciers."

Pachauri has been put in the position of defending the integrity of the IPCC, integrity that has been compromised by others.

Now Pachauri, the chair of the IPCC, has directly damaged the credibility of the IPCC.  He has done it, it is alleged, by letting world leaders go to the Copenhagen summit with information he knew (or at least strongly suspected) was bad, information that came from his organization.  He has compounded that damage by lying about, and then being caught in a lie.

The steady drumbeat of calls for his resignation might well rise to the level of a dull roar. 

If so, who inside and outside of the IPCC is going to stick his or her neck out in defense of Pachauri?  I think the answer to that question will be interesting.  Pachauri is the face the global warming movement, having accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the IPCC, sharing the stage with Al Gore.

Those who choose to defend Pachauri will be gambling that Pachauri won't make things worse tomorrow with yet another shocking surprise.  In any case, those people will putting their own futures at risk, as they might end up going down with Pachauri should things get much worse.

Those who choose to demand that Pachauri resign might have convinced themselves that this course of action is the best for global warming alarmism, but can their movement sustain the very public loss of Pachauri at this stage?  And how will they be perceived by others in the movement?  As traitors?   

Interesting times.