Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Geneva-based IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), appears unready to bow to pressure to step down, if comments made to the BBC Friday 5 February are any indication.
“‘There is one mistake that occurred unfortunately, and we have clearly accepted that; we have expressed regret that it took place,’” the BBC quotes him as saying. “‘But there’s a huge volume of science over there – I mean, the IPCC’s fourth assessment report is a massive piece of work – and I think all of what we have said over there is totally valid.’”
Pachauri is in Delhi, India, for an IPCC sustainability conference.
Researchers and others in the climate change field are calling on Pachauri to accept personal responsibility for a significant error that was part of a recent IPCC report on climate change, which stated incorrectly that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.
The criticism has heated up debates over the validity of climate change data and the conclusions drawn from these. The IPCC stated in January that errors in the report were due to its usual standards for checking not being correctly applied, in two areas.
Pachauri has long been an eminent figure in the environmental sciences world, and he was named chairman of the IPCC in 2002. He came to wider public attention in December 2007 when he and former US Vice-president Al Gore jointly accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, Pachauri for the work done by the IPCC.
Calls for his resignation or at least for a serious reappraisal of the IPCC’s dealings with the public have come from several corners, with the latest coming from the head of Greenpeace UK, John Sauven, talking to the Times, UK. The Indian government, on the other hand, voiced strong support for Pachauri himself, and the work of the IPCC, at the Delhi conference.
Links to other sites: BBC, Financial Times interview 3 February, Independent, IPCC news page, Le Temps (Fre), Pachauri’s blog, Times, UK
This work by genevalunch.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.
News story, GenevaLunch, 5 February 2010.
Filed under: International organizations
Tags: chairman, climate, climate change, environment, Himalayan glaciers, IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, resignation
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March 10th, 2010 at 11:37 pm
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