Greenpeace UK is calling on the head of the U. N's major climate change panel to resign, as reported in the Times Online:
The head of the UN’s climate change body is under pressure to resign after one of his strongest allies in the environmental movement said his judgment was flawed and called for a new leader to restore confidence in climatic science. . .
John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK , said that Dr Pachauri should have acted as soon as he had been informed of the error, even though issuing a correction would have embarrassed the IPCC on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit.
A journalist working for Science had told Dr Pachauri several times late last year that glaciologists had refuted the IPCC claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Dr Pachauri refused to address the problem, saying: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.” He suggested that the error would not be corrected until 2013 or 2014, when the IPCC next reported.
With global stock markets and commodities under significant pressure as they sense the bursting of a Chinese bubble and the loss of sudden money-printing, one can get a sense that jobs are gaining primacy over global warming considerations. Discord in the environmental movement weakens it.
As in the 1970s, when the modern environmental movement was born in the U. S., it is necessary that we have a sustainable balance of considerations. What Dr. Pachauri is accused of having done harms his cause and provides fodder for his critics. There is no easily identifiable "truth" in making long-range predictions about the future, but scientific fraud or near-fraud will invalidate in people's minds even well-grounded reasoning--which global warming advocates may or may not have.
As politicians grope for growth to bail them out of their many promises, they are likely to shelve costly schemes that may be good for Mother Earth but that harm the economy in the short term.
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