Pachauri cooked up facts to corner grants: Report

Did RK Pachauri, chairman of the UN-led Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), make bogus claims on the Himalayan glaciers to corner huge grants? While Pachauri has denied the allegation vehemently, the British media believes in it.

The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), headed by Pachauri, received up to £310,000 from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and a major portion of a £2.5m European Union (EU) grant funded by European taxpayers, The Sunday Times has alleged.

“It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus,” said the newspaper. The report comes just a week after British journalists found serious scientific flaws in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report which claimed that all Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035. The IPCC has now retracted the statement, but maintains that it was only a human error.

The Sunday Times has now found that the dubious claims mentioned in the report were cited in grant applications for Teri. “One of them, announced earlier this month just before the scandal broke, resulted in a £310,000 grant from Carnegie,” the paper said.  

An abstract of the grant application published on Carnegie’s website said that the Himalaya glaciers, vital to more than a dozen major rivers that sustain hundreds of millions of people in South Asia, are melting and receding at a dangerous rate. The Carnegie money was specifically given to aid research into the potential security and humanitarian impact on the region as the glaciers began to disappear, it added.

“No, it is not true that Teri has benefited,” said RK Pachauri when contacted.

The Sunday Times report also found that the second grant, from the European Union, was to the tune of £2.5million. It was meant to assess the impact of Himalayan glaciers’ retreat.

“It was part of the EU’s HighNoon project, launched last May to fund research into how India might adapt to loss of glaciers. In one presentation at last May’s launch, Anastasios Kentarchos, of the European Commission’s Climate Change and Environmental Risks Unit, specifically cited the IPCC claims about glacier melt as a reason for pouring EU taxpayers’ money into the project,” the report claimed.

Another controversy that surrounds Pachauri, the report said, that the panel based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny. The report’s author later withdrew the claim because the evidence was too weak.

The link was central to demands at last month’s Copenhagen climate summit by African nations for compensation of $100 billion from rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions.
According to the newspaper, the panel knew in 2008 that the link could not be proved but did not alert world leaders.