Son of Climategate, Post #2

The news continues pour out of Europe with regard to what I have called (see post #1 below) the Himalayan Glacier Melt Fiasco and that some are now dubbing "Glaciergate."  Before reading further, please read the post below. OK, thanks.

The Times of London has been conducting an investigation into Glaciergate and has found there is an interesting connection between the head of the IPCC and the "conversation" that lead to the "glaciers melting by 2035 claim"... ( entire article here )

What has now come to light, however, is that the scientist from whom this claim originated, Dr Syed Hasnain, has for the past two years been working as a senior employee of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the Delhi-based company of which Dr Pachauri is director-general. Furthermore, the claim – now disowned by Dr Pachauri as chairman of the IPCC – has helped TERI to win a substantial share of a $500,000 grant from one of America's leading charities, along with a share in a three million euro research study funded by the EU. 

Tomorrow's edition of the Times is now online.  It has a second story running under the headline, "UN Wrongly Linked Global Warming to Natural Disasters." It states,

THE United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report's own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

The paper goes on to state,

The new controversy also goes back to the IPCC's 2007 report in which a separate section warned that the world had "suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s".

It suggested a part of this increase was due to global warming and cited the unpublished report, saying: "One study has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend."

The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report.

When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses."

Despite this change the IPCC did not issue a clarification ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit last month. 

The paper in question was requested by Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. (full-disclosure, Roger is a friend and formerly served on WeatherData's board of directors). The article continues,

Muir-Wood's paper was originally commissioned by Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, also an expert on disaster impacts, for a workshop on disaster losses in 2006. The researchers who attended that workshop published a statement agreeing that so far there was no evidence to link global warming with any increase in the severity or frequency of disasters. Pielke has also told the IPCC that citing one section of Muir-Wood's paper in preference to the rest of his work, and all the other peer-reviewed literature, was wrong.

He said: "All the literature published before and since the IPCC report shows that rising disaster losses can be explained entirely by social change. People have looked hard for evidence that global warming plays a part but can't find it. Muir-Wood's study actually confirmed that."

The paper in question was requested by Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. (full-disclosure, Roger is a friend and used to serve on WeatherData's board of directors).  Roger's take on this is posted at his blog here.

Some of us have known for years the IPCC's reports are not at all what they have claimed to be. With the Climategate and FOIA documents made public, many skeptics learned where to look for the evidence.

There are going to be at least two, and possibly more, posts outlining what we have learned since Climategate. It isn't pretty.