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?
Showing posts with label Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Show all posts
18 February 2010
30 January 2010
IPCC's Pachauri Must Resign
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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21 January 2010
IPCC Sucker Punches Itself, Again
This is getting ridiculous. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is becoming its own worst enemy, providing more fodder for climate skeptics.
The UN's top climate authority issued an apology yesterday for what it now says was a flawed "prediction" regarding the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035.
New Scientist magazine broke the story last week about the quote attributed to Indian scientist Syed Hasnain, who claimed that he was misquoted in a media interview that was later used in the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment report.
New Scientist reported the comment in 1999 as part of what it says was an email interview with India's leading glaciologist. There were no other sources for the claim, other than a 2005 WWF report (PDF, see Correction on page 2) cited the New Scientist article, but it still found its way into the IPCC report.
"I have not made any prediction on date as I am not an astrologer but I did say they were shrinking fast," Hasnain has said, according to an article in TimesOnline. "I have never written 2035 in any of my research papers or reports."
At the time of the original interview, Professor Hasnain worked for Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi and was chairman of the International Commission on Snow and Ice's working group on Himalayan glacialology. He now works for The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in Delhi, which is headed by Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN climate change panel.
This is the latest in a series of attacks on the "consensus" around the theory of global climate change and may further erode public sentiment on the issue. The IPCC chairman has recently come under fire for allegations of conflict of interest and the credibility of some of the computer modeling used in the report was called into question when emails between climate scientists were hacked late last year.
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The UN's top climate authority issued an apology yesterday for what it now says was a flawed "prediction" regarding the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035.
New Scientist magazine broke the story last week about the quote attributed to Indian scientist Syed Hasnain, who claimed that he was misquoted in a media interview that was later used in the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment report.
New Scientist reported the comment in 1999 as part of what it says was an email interview with India's leading glaciologist. There were no other sources for the claim, other than a 2005 WWF report (PDF, see Correction on page 2) cited the New Scientist article, but it still found its way into the IPCC report.
"I have not made any prediction on date as I am not an astrologer but I did say they were shrinking fast," Hasnain has said, according to an article in TimesOnline. "I have never written 2035 in any of my research papers or reports."
At the time of the original interview, Professor Hasnain worked for Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi and was chairman of the International Commission on Snow and Ice's working group on Himalayan glacialology. He now works for The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in Delhi, which is headed by Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN climate change panel.
This is the latest in a series of attacks on the "consensus" around the theory of global climate change and may further erode public sentiment on the issue. The IPCC chairman has recently come under fire for allegations of conflict of interest and the credibility of some of the computer modeling used in the report was called into question when emails between climate scientists were hacked late last year.
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