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. 

<By Marina Kamenev, Sydney for Time Magazine

In Western societies, disposing of a dead body has come down to two choices: there’s burial, and there’s cremation. Occasionally, a corpse is donated to science, but even those remains usually make their way to the crematorium in the end.

But since climate change has piqued the world’s environmental awareness, it has become clear that death, despite being the most natural of processes, is bad for the environment. Coffins, most of which are made from nonbiodegradable chipboard, take up valuable land space. Even when coffins are biodegradable, embalming liquid, which often contains carcinogenic formaldehyde, can leak into the soil. Cremation, during which remains are burned at 1,562F (850C), comes with its own problems. According to the research of University of Melbourne professor Roger Short, the process can create up to 350 lb. (160 kg) of greenhouse gases per corpse, including the remains of the coffin. 

In Australia, one company recently started selling a greener alternative. Aquamation Industries claims to offer a unique, cheaper, more carbon-neutral method of body disposal. Aquamation employs a process called alkaline hydrolysis, in which a body is placed in a stainless-steel vat containing a 200°F (93°C) potassium-hydroxide-and-water solution for four hours until all that remains is the skeleton. The bones, which are soft at that point, are then crushed and presented to the deceased’s family. The residual liquid contains no DNA, and the procedure uses only 5% to 10% of the energy that cremation uses, says John Humphries, a former funeral-home director who is now the chief executive of Aquamation Industries, which launched its services in August. According to Humphries, Aquamation accelerates the processes that occur in nature. Even the residual liquid can be recycled: Humphries measures the pH after the procedure is completed, and if it’s deemed too high in alkalinity, he adds vinegar or citric acid to it afterward. By that time, he says, it’s safe enough to pour on the rose bushes.

David Brynn Hibbert, a professor of analytical chemistry at the University of New South Wales, has a different interpretation of the process. “Potassium hydroxide is similar to the stuff you use to clean the oven. It has that soapy feel that strips your fingerprints if you accidentally get it on your hands. If you can imagine the way that it dissolves leftover cooking fats, well, the solution does the same thing with a human body.” Hibbert adds that the remaining liquid would have to be neutralized to be poured over living plants. “It might be too high in alkalinity initially, but the right amount of vinegar or citric acid would correct that.”

At present, the only functioning aquamation unit is at Eco Memorial Park on Australia’s Gold Coast, a tourist hot spot that seems an unusual destination for an innovative death industry. Humphries says 15 more Aquamation units have been sold to funeral homes around Australia and will be operational within the next nine months. He says more than 60 people have already paid to be aquamated, and he has been flooded with phone calls since an article about the procedure appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. In a poll appearing alongside the article, 68% of the 2,065 surveyed said they would consider being aquamated.

In truth, aquamation isn’t completely new. Alkaline hydrolysis has been used to destroy cattle infected with mad cow disease after it was found to be the only method effective in eradicating the deadly prions, or misshapen proteins, that cause the illness. It has also been used in the U.S. for the disposal of bodies donated to science, a process often referred to as resomation. Resomation has been approved in six U.S. states as a body-disposal option and is expected to be approved in the U.K. by the end of 2010. (In 2009, TIME listed resomation as one of the year’s top 10 environmental ideas.)

Still, the appeal of the practice has been limited. In 2006, New Hampshire legalized resomation, but the state banned it in 2008. It was never used in there, and senators reportedly found the prospect of flushing loved ones down the drain somewhat ghoulish. Resomation is a variation of aquamation, but unlike aquamation, resomation places the corpse into a temperature of 170F (77C) for approximately three hours. Humphries argues that the temperature, rather than the “yuck factor,” is the real reason this method of body disposal hasn’t taken off. “Can you imagine if something goes wrong in a piece of machinery that contains 170 temperatures and 45,000 kg of pressure per every square meter?” says Humphries. “Our equipment is much safer.”

In Australia, aquamation has had a mixed response from scientists. Barry Brook, an environmental scientist from the University of Adelaide, says any step taken toward saving the environment is a positive one. However, Short, who spoke out against cremation in 2008, is more ambivalent: “I just don’t see why it would be better than a natural ["i.e., free of embalming, with a biodegradable coffin or a cloth shroud with biodegradable lining"] burial. You can be buried in a forest for the cost of almost nothing, and the trees would sequester carbon dioxide from the environment for years and years.”
(See TIME’s special report about the Copenhagen Climate-Change Conference.)

Kevin Hartley, spokesman for the Natural Earth Burial Society in South Australia, advocates more-natural burials but acknowledges that land availability is problematic. “Because it has to be done within the constraints of the existing funeral industry, it doesn’t work out to be that cheap,” he says. Yet he asserts that if he could acquire a plot of land and manage it his way, he could theoretically bury 10,000 people per hectare. “We could keep burying Australians this way for the next 500 years.”

Hartley discounts the safety concerns over resomation. “There are a million industrial processes which use high-pressure equipment,” he says. “Resomation isn’t popular because no matter how you gloss it up, the process involves boiling someone’s loved one away.”

Humphries, for his part, intends to be aquamated when the time comes. “Now, since being involved in the industry, I think it’s a really nice way to go,” he says. “But before I started this business, I never really gave it much thought. I didn’t care what anyone did with me - I would be dead.”

Read more here.

By Dennis Ambler, SPPI

We have had “An Inconvenient Truth”, “The Day After Tomorrow”, “Acid Test” “The Age of Stupid”, all propaganda films pushing the central tenets of the Global Warming movement and produced by professional film-makers.

We have had scary adverts for children, warning of the planet’s imminent collapse unless we “mend our ways” and that means your parents, kids.

We now have a new low in media presentations, a film that was available on You Tube, until it was pulled today, within a few hours of the exposure it received when the Guardian highlighted it as part of their support for the 10:10 climate change campaign. I suspect they were quite surprised by the reactions even from AGW supporters. ICECAP NOTE: the video has reappeared here.

This delightful film series has the title “No Pressure” and is written by Richard Curtis, a highly successful writer with a long list of comedy successes to his name. It comes from the Franny Armstrong stable, famous for the dreadful “Age of Stupid” film, showing a world destroyed by its inhabitants. This nice little example is no comedy, although it producers think it is highly entertaining. The title of the Guardian article in which the film is linked, is entitled: “There will be blood”.

The main message from the film is that the planet has only four years left for long term survival unless we all cut back our emissions of CO2 now. Anyone who doesn’t agree is detonated, with lots of blood and guts sprayed around. It even has a rider attached that says: This film contains scenes that some viewers may find distressing. Not suitable for children.

This is what activist film maker Franny Armstrong thinks about her work:

“Doing nothing about climate change is still a fairly common affliction, even in this day and age. What to do with those people, who are together threatening everybody’s existence on this planet?

Clearly we don’t really think they should be blown up, that’s just a joke for the mini-movie, but maybe a little amputating would be a good place to start?” jokes 10:10 founder and Age of Stupid film maker Franny Armstrong.”

This woman is so hilarious it hurts. So anyone who disagrees with them has “an affliction” and is threatening everybody’s existence on the planet. What crass, hubristic arrogance from this spoilt brat.

The Guardian interviewer asks her, “But why take such a risk of upsetting or alienating people?”

Her reply: “Because we have got about four years to stabilise global emissions and we are not anywhere near doing that. All our lives are at threat and if that’s not worth jumping up and down about, I don’t know what is.”

“We ‘killed’ five people to make No Pressure - a mere blip compared to the 300,000 real people who now die each year from climate change,” she adds.

Of course she has no evidence to back up this valueless claim, which comes from the United Nations, but in fact previous centuries have shown considerable mortality from extreme weather events long before carbon dioxide became flavour of the month.

They are perverting the minds of young children:

“Jamie Glover, the child-actor who plays the part of Philip and gets blown up, has similarly few qualms: “I was very happy to get blown up to save the world.”

Although again intended to be in jest, (I hope), is it an over-reaction to suggest that that sounds like a jihadist?

Richard Curtis, is equally proud of the production: “The writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Blackadder and an early 10:10 supporter, acknowledges that the 10:10 film is very direct.”

“The 10:10 team are a fearless, energetic bunch, completely dedicated to getting the public fired up about climate change. They also turn out to be surprisingly good at blowing stuff up,” he said.”

So how many eco-terrorists of the future are they fostering by this crude attempt at propaganda. Maybe their next proposal will be to “eliminate” China to stop their emissions.

Armstrong’s film, the “Age of Stupid”, was embraced by the Royal Society in March this year, when they organized a Public Symposium with the Tate Modern Gallery in London. It’s title was: Rising to the Climate Challenge - Artists and Scientists Imagine Tomorrow’s World.

“Tate and the Royal Society collaborate by bringing together scientists and artists to imagine the social and psychological impacts of climate change.

On 19 and 20 March, Tate and the Royal Society collaborate to bring you a screening of the film The Age of Stupid following, (sic) by a discussion and a public symposium about the social and psychological impacts of climate change.”

If that is what passes for science today from the august 300 year old Royal Society, it’s no wonder they had so many complaints from their members that they have had to re-write their treatise on climate change to remove a lot of the non-science.

Franny Armstrong has a film company called “Spanner Films”:

“Former pop drummer and self-taught filmmaker Franny Armstrong, born 1972, has directed three feature documentaries - The Age of Stupid (2008), McLibel (2005) and Drowned Out (2003) - which have together been seen by 70 million people on TV, cinema, internet and DVD worldwide. In the early days of the internet in 1996 she founded the McSpotlight website, which Wired magazine described as “the blueprint for all activist websites”.

Through her company, Spanner Films, “Franny” pioneered the “crowd-funding” finance model, which allows filmmakers to raise reasonable-size budgets whilst retaining ownership of their films - Age of Stupid is the most successful known example, raising 900,000+pounds from 300+ investors - as well as the “Indie Screenings” distribution system, which lets anyone make a profit by holding screenings of independent films - Stupid was screened locally 1,100+ times in the first six months.

Then in September 2009, a million people watched Stupid’s Global Premiere event - featuring Kofi Annan, Gillian Anderson & Radiohead’s Thom Yorke - in 700 cinemas in 63 countries, linked by satellite. In September 2009 Franny founded the 10:10 climate campaign, which aims to cut the UK’s carbon emissions by 10% during 2010.

It seems that she has found considerable traction and no doubt funding, from public companies and government bodies.

The campaign has amassed huge cross-societal support including Adidas, Microsoft, Spurs FC, the Royal Mail, 75,000 people, 1,500 schools, a third of local councils, the entire UK Government and the Prime Minister, (then Gordon Brown, no doubt the new incumbent has been happy to go along with it as well) 10:10 launched internationally in March 2010 and, as of July 2010, has autonomous campaigns up and running in 41 countries, where some of the key sign-ups include the French Tennis Open, the city of Oslo and L’Oreal.

Armstrong’s parents are both in the environment game and also feature on the spannerfilms website.

Her step-mother is co-founder of the OneWorld Network and co-director of OneWorld UK.

Her father, Peter, is co-founder of the OneWorld Network and director for the OneWorld International Foundation, although their site shows no activities since 2008. He is described as a former BBC radio and TV producer and a policy advisor to governments and international bodies on the use of information and communications technology for global sustainable development.

Let us hope that this excursion into the ridiculous will make her sponsors think again about their relationship with this type of distorted propaganda.

Read the blog post here.