Global Yawning: De Boer Resigns; Should UN Get Out of Climate Biz?

The UN's top climate change official, Yvo de Boer, says he will leave his post after four years, reportedly to take a consulting position with KPMG, according the BBC News this morning.

He will vacate the position at the end of June, only 5 months before 193 countries will get together again for another shot at a climate deal.

But after the failure of Copenhagen, lingering questions surrounding the UN IPPC and its head Dr. Rajendra Pauchauri, along with other scandals making headlines involving alledged scientific data manipulations and other shenanigans, is it time for the UN to get out of the business of climate change?

Wouldn't it be better to put the collective resources spent by the 193 countries involved in climate talks into a massive R&D fund to help catalyze investments in the technologies needed to address the issue?

Is Mr. de Boer himself sending a message by heading to the private sector to focus on climate and sutainability issues?

IPCC's Pachauri Must Resign

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The Times of London reports this morning that the head of the UN's International Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, was told that the IPCC assertion that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to take actions to correct it.

Dr. Pachauri, who played a lead role at the recent Copenhagen climate summit where he called for drastic cuts in carbon emissions, corrected the error last week after coming under media scrutiny.

Apparently, Dr. Pachauri told The Times as recently as January 22 that he had only known about the error for a few days.

The Times reports "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.'"

When pressed in that original interview, he insisted that he hadn't heard about the mistake prior to Copenhagen.

"However," the Times reports, "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.'"

Dr. Pachauri, who now claims that he was preoccupied with a number of events surrounding the summit and that he inadvertently failed to mention the error, has been accused of potential conflicts of interest surrounding carbon emissions reductions and from "using the error to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds," according to the Times.

Late last year, there was additional controversy generated around data used in the IPCC report and elsewhere when emails were discovered between climate scientists that raised questions about potential manipulation of data and climate modeling projections.

This latest controversy further erodes Dr. Pachauri's credibility at a time when public opinion about global warming continues to slip.

It is time for Dr. Pacahuri to resign as head of IPCC and for a full investigation and review of the IPCC reports.

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