By Paul Chesser, American Spectator

It looks like Sony and Kyocera Mita have demanded their removal from all associations with the extremist climate group 10:10.org, which produced that exploding schoolchildren video last week. The corporations’ names have been removed from the list of partners, and a lengthy post by Sony’s point-person on climate change, Naomi Climer, has been deleted from the 10:10 site.

Not only that, but a huge U.S. environmentalist promoter and partner, 350.org (headed by Bill McKibben), is no longer listed as an organizational partner. Both 10:10 and 350 have been heavily promoting an October 10 (10/10/10) “global workday” to supposedly bring fresh attention to the global warming threat. The message from 350.org’s press shop:

We respect 10:10’s previous work to encourage companies, schools, and churches to voluntarily cut their carbon emissions 10%. Upon seeing the video, however, we have informed 10:10 that we can no longer remain partners on 10/10/10 or any other initiative. 350.org maintains an absolute commitment to nonviolence in word and deed.

After Friday’s weak apology, 10:10 U.K. director Eugenie Harvey issued this statement today, clearly stung by the global outrage:

We also issued a statement apologising but there has subsequently been quite a lot of negative comment, particularly on blogs, and understandable concern from others working hard to build support for action on climate change.

We are also sorry to our corporate sponsors, delivery partners and board members, who have been implicated in this situation despite having no involvement in the film’s production or release.

I am very sorry for our mistake and want to reassure you that we will do everything in our power to ensure it does not happen again.

10:10 is a young and creative team but we will learn lessons from this. We are going to investigate what happened, review our processes and procedures, and share the results with our partners.  Responsibility for this process is being taken by the 10:10 board of directors.

Being “young and creative” is a bunch of garbage and another lame excuse. Gillian Anderson, whose CGI-generated guts were splattered in the film, is neither young nor creative, yet she went along with the program. Dozens if not hundreds of others were involved in the creation of the video and you can’t tell me they all were “young and creative.” They were just committed to the message. As Iowahawk wrote:

In order for your “No Pressure” advert to have been made, I am assuming several writers pitched a professionally-prepared storyboard to a committee, detailing shot-by-shot each second of the film. The committee approved it, along with a minimum $250,000 budget to hire actors, director, & crew. Each scene probably took 3-10 takes, and weeks of post production by special effects wizards.

At no time did a single person involved in this (expletive) say, “hey, maybe it isn’t the best PR to air our fantasies about detonating the people who don’t agree with us into a mist of blood meat and bone fragments.”

At his site Iowahawk imagines how the video plans came together, which sounds pretty plausible.

See post here.

By Rosalind Helderman, Washington Post

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has sent a new civil subpoena to the University of Virginia, renewing a demand for documents related to a work of a former university climate scientist that was stymied when a judge blocked his previous request in August.

The new Civil Investigative Demand revives a contentious fight between Cuccinelli and the university over documents related to the work of Michael Mann, a prominent climate scientist whose research concluded that the earth has experienced a rapid, recent warming. Mann worked at U-Va. until 2005; he is now employed by Penn State University.

In the demand sent to the university last week, Cuccinelli once again asked that the school turn over all e-mails exchanged between former university professor Michael Mann and 39 other scientists as well as between Mann and his secretaries and research associates.

An Albemarle County judge had quashed a previous demand from Cuccinelli at the request of the university, ruling that Cuccinelli had not properly explained his rationale for believing fraud may have been committed. He also ruled that Cuccinelli had no right to documents about grants conducted using federal instead of state dollars.

In response, Cuccinelli has limited his demand to the e-mails and documents related to one state grant Mann received. The attorney general dropped requests for paperwork related to four other federal grants. But he expanded a section explaining why he sought the records, laying out in writing that he seeks the documents because Mann wrote two papers on global warming that “have come under significant criticism” and that Mann “knew or should have known contained false information, unsubstantiated claims and/or were otherwise misleading.”

“Specifically, but without limitation, some of the conclusions of the papers demonstrate a complete lack of rigor regarding the statistical analysis of the alleged data, meaning that the result reported lacked statistical significance without a specific statement to that effect,” the CID alleges.

And late last week, he filed a notice with the court that he plans to appeal the judge’s ruling, a clerk with the circuit court confirmed.

The CID gives the university until Oct. 29 to comply, leaving the school’s Board of Visitors with a few weeks to decide whether to cooperate or to once again resist. Faculty at the school and academics across the country will likely push for a return to court, arguing that acceding to Cuccinelli’s inquiry would have a chilling affect on academic freedom and unpopular research.

Mann said with Cuccinelli’s narrowing of his request, he has now limited the request to documents related to a grant that funded research unrelated to climate change.

“I find it extremely disturbing that Mr. Cuccinelli has sought to continue to abuse his power as the attorney general of Virginia in this way, in the process smearing the University of Virginia and me and other climate scientists,” Mann said. “The people of Virginia need to be extremely disturbed that he is using their tax dollars to pursue this partisan witch hunt.”

Mann has long been targeted by those who, like Cuccinelli, do not believe that the science behind global warming is sound. Some of his methodologies have been criticized by other scientists, but an inquiry by Pennsylvania State University concluded that there was no evidence that Mann engaged in efforts to falsify or suppress data and his research conclusions have been affirmed by others in the field.

We’ve reached out to the university for a response and we also expect comment from the attorney general’s office soon. See post here.

By Fred Pearce, Daily Mail

In scientific circles they call him Patchy. His real name is Rajendra Pachauri, the supremo of climate science at the United Nations, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

He picked up the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of his organisation less than three years ago. But it was pride before the fall.

I lit the fuse under Patchy’s chairmanship eight months ago. Now, I say he should go. If governments won’t fire him when the IPCC meets at the Korean seaside resort of Busan next week, he should fall on his sword. For the good of the battered reputation of climate-change science. For the good of the planet.

Patchy is an amiable, bearded, vegetarian railway engineer and cricket fanatic, born under the British Raj in India. He has been showered with prizes, including Indian of the Year in 2007, and held jobs all over the world. He got the IPCC chair in 2002, after the Americans fell out with the then chairman, a Brit called Bob Watson, who is now our Government’s chief environmental scientist.

But Patchy is not a climate scientist. And he is 70 years old now. There have been too many mistakes during his eight years at the top of the IPCC. And he has made too many of them worse. Patchy is no longer part of the solution to telling the world about climate science. He is part of the problem.

How did I light the fuse under Patchy? I am a science journalist - one who happens to believe that man-made climate change is virtually beyond doubt. The story began last December when a Canadian expert on glaciers called Graham Cogley emailed me to say that an IPCC report published two years before, with Patchy named as first author, contained a dreadful error. It claimed that, thanks to global warming, all the Himalayan glaciers would be gone within a generation - by 2035.

It was a stunning claim, but simply not true, said Cogley. The warming was certain enough, but the melting would not take 25 years; more like 350 years. But, he went on, the reason the crazy claim was in the report, which had been signed off by 1,000 scientists, almost 200 governments and the entire UN system, was an article I had written a decade before. My blood ran as cold as any glacier. Could this be true? I could believe my story had been proved wrong. But journalism is not supposed to be peer-reviewed science. And peer-reviewed science is most certainly not supposed to be journalism. This kind of thing shouldn’t happen.

The IPCC report gave as its source for the prediction a report by the Indian branch of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). So what was the WWF’s source? The only one it gave was a short news item I wrote in New Scientist magazine in 1999, quoting a top Indian glaciologist and university vicechancellor called Syed Hasnain. He had told me he was about to deliver a report, based on four years’ study, that said the central and eastern Himalayas would be ice-free by 2035. When the claim turned up in the 2007 IPCC report, I smiled to think I’d had the story eight years before. But Cogley, a glaciologist at Trent University in Canada, said: ‘Fred, it’s still wrong. The glaciers are up to half a kilometre thick; they are not going to disappear overnight. It will take centuries.’

‘He turned a one-line mistake into a diplomatic incident. And the voodoo science was at the IPCC.’ What does a journalist do? He writes the story, of course. I wrote an article explaining how, far from substantiating Hasnain’s claim, the IPCC had clearly not checked it at all. When it said: ‘Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high,’ it had just copied and pasted the WWF’s words.

And this is where Patchy comes into the picture. A quick apology and retraction from the boss of the IPCC, and chief author of the report, would have defused the situation. Instead, when Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh accused the IPCC of being ‘alarmist’ about the melting Himalayas, Patchy accused him of ‘voodoo science’. He turned a one-line mistake into a diplomatic incident. And the voodoo science was at the IPCC.

Oh, and one other thing. By now my discredited source, Hasnain, had ceased to be a vice-chancellor and had taken up a new post. He was head of glaciology at the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a prestigious Indian think-tank set up by Tata, an industrial conglomerate best known for making tens of millions of Indian trucks. TERI is run by - you guessed it - Dr Rajendra Pachauri.

After my article laying bare the unedifying story appeared last January, the row became headline news round the world. Inevitably, it became known as ‘Glaciergate’. A few people criticised me for writing the original story without checking whether other glaciologists agreed with Hasnain. Fair cop, maybe, though he was vice-chancellor of one of India’s top universities at the time and his findings were about to be reported to the International Commission on Snow and Ice. Can nobody be trusted?

Then a few people criticised me for revealing the truth and undermining the IPCC’s credibility. Well, sorry guys, we all have to try to get our facts right. But the IPCC’s big mistake was not owning up to the error promptly. As they used to say about the original ‘-gate’ - the Watergate break-in that brought down US President Richard Nixon - it is the cover-up that is politically deadly, not the original offence.

Only after a week of worsening headlines did the white flag go up from inside Patchy’s bunker. But by then his rashness in defending the indefensible had turned the IPCC into a laughing-stock. Sometimes I want to cry for an agency stuffed with good, conscientious and clever people brought down by such stupidity.

Since then Patchy has been pursued by journalists looking for new IPCC errors. They had plenty of material to work with: more than a thousand pages of the IPCC’s five yearly assessment, published under his name in three volumes in 2007.

Actually, most of it stood up to the challenge pretty well. In parts it was, if anything, too cautious - for instance, playing down growing fears among climate scientists about scary tipping points in climate that could destroy the Greenland ice cap or trigger super-hurricanes and mega-droughts.

But the second volume, on the possible impacts of climate change, was less sound. It was co-edited by a British academic called Roger Parry of Imperial College London, who has so far managed to evade the flak. Some of the mistakes in that volume were silly. It said 55 per cent of the Netherlands was below sea level. The real figure is 26 per cent, but the Dutch government gave the wrong stats. No big deal. It got the references all wrong for a claim that 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest could die within a few decades from heat and drought. Sloppy again, but no big deal.

What about this, however? A headline claim in the report was that African farming is heading for the abyss. And very soon. ‘Projected reductions in [crop] yield in some countries could be as much as 50 per cent by 2020,’ it said. Phew. That captured public attention - not least because Patchy highlighted it in several of his public speeches. Tens of millions would starve.

But was it true? The footnote referenced an 11-page paper by a Moroccan called Ali Agoumi that covered only three of Africa’s 53 countries: Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. Agoumi’s paper, which had not gone through scientific peer review, simply asserted without giving any evidence or sources that ‘studies on the future of vital agriculture in the region have shown… deficient yields from rain-based agriculture of up to 50 per cent during the 2000-2020 period’.

What studies? He has never said. Even Agoumi did not claim the changes were caused by climate change. In fact, harvests already differ by 50 per cent or more from one year to the next, depending on rainfall. In other words, Ali Agoumi’s thin, un-reviewed paper said nothing at all about how climate change might or might not change farm yields across Africa.

‘The UN became sufficiently scared by all the bad press for the IPCC that it set up a high level commission to investigate.’ That’s not to say climate change won’t cause droughts, or that droughts are not big killers in Africa. This is a serious matter. It deserves serious attention. So how much more disgraceful is it that the IPCC stats - stats highlighted personally by Patchy - were junk?

Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri receive Nobel Peace Prize

When I raised these issues, the only answer I got was an email from Patchy’s co-editor Roger Parry from a ‘working retreat’ on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. He said the criticisms of his report were ‘clamour without substance’. Patchy agreed.

Even so, the UN became sufficiently scared by all the bad press for the IPCC that it set up a high level commission to investigate. This InterAcademy Council included nominees from Britain’s prestigious Royal Society. The council’s report, published at the end of August, was damning. Chairman Harold Shapiro found that Parry’s climate impacts report in particular showed a tendency to ‘emphasise the negative impacts of climate change’, many of which were ‘not sufficiently supported in the literature, not put into perspective or not expressed clearly’.

How did that happen? Well, they used ‘non-peer-reviewed literature’, such as WWF reports, without the findings being ‘adequately evaluated’ - perhaps a polite phrase for the IPCC’s disgraceful use of that old standby of students: copy and paste.

This farrago coincided with another scandal in climate science. With a certain lack of originality, we hacks called it Climategate. This was the release of all those emails from scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. The scientists were in charge of trying to piece together the history of changing global temperatures, using thermometer records, tree rings or whatever other information they could get their hands on.

The emails did not, as some claimed, reveal a massive conspiracy-to con us about climate change. But they certainly showed scientists using underhand tactics to silence their critics - critics who claim the tree rings don’t show anything worth knowing about temperature, and that some of the data on global warming of recent decades are contaminated by the local warming effects of urbanisation.

Climategate was bad news for Patchy too. For the emails reveal University of East Anglia scientists sidelining criticisms of their own work when compiling IPCC reports - prompting the InterAcademy Council to call for the IPCC to adopt a ‘rigorous conflict-of-interest policy’. Why wasn’t there one already? Ask Patchy.

Even grubbier, when someone put in a Freedom of Information request, asking to see emails discussing drafting of the IPCC report, the University of East Anglia scientists emailed colleagues asking for those emails to be deleted. This was against IPCC rules and possibly against British law.

Did Patchy know about this? Probably not. Should he have been policing how the IPCC authors went about their task? Surely that was his job. What was his response when the emails were published online? He defended the scientists.

There is a pattern of behaviour here, I think, from the man with arguably the most important role in protecting the world from climatic meltdown. Complacency. Loyalty to those who do not deserve it. Intemperate statements at inopportune times. Climate scientists should not tolerate this. Environmentalists should not tolerate this. The UN should not tolerate this.

The InterAcademy Council’s report to the UN refused to say that Patchy should go. But this was humbug. It said that, in future, IPCC chairmen and other top leaders should serve only one term, overseeing one five-year scientific assessment. The council said it was nothing personal. But it reached that conclusion because of what happened on Patchy’s watch. Surely it must apply to him above all.

Let’s be clear. The basic problem here is not climate science. There is very little doubt that the world has been warming this past half century. And little doubt either that man-made pollution is mainly to blame. The problem is the IPCC. Nobel Prize or no Nobel Prize, the 22-year old organisation is too important to be allowed to fail. It is badly in need of reform. A fresh start with a new, less accident-prone chairman.

Will they bite the bullet in Busan? There are stories going around that Western governments are unwilling to wield the knife because they fear a backlash from India and the developing world. How ridiculous.

After the ‘voodoo science’ row over Glaciergate, I doubt Pachauri has many friends in the Indian government anyway.

Even so, if he isn’t going to be pushed, he should jump. Sorry, Patchy, but time is up. Read more here.

Also see this Christopher Booker story about Pachauri’s charities financial anomalies.