UN climate panel faces new controversy
The United Nations panel of climate scientist, headed by India's Rajendra Pachauri faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to a rise in natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.
According to The Sunday Times, the panel based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny - and ignored warnings from scientific advisers. 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 USD 100 billion from the 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.
Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change minister, has suggested British and overseas floods - such as those in Bangladesh in 2007 - could be linked to global warming.
US President Barack Obama said last autumn: "More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent."
In another report, The Sunday Telegraph said the scientist whose report originally claimed that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035, 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 Pachauri as chairman of the IPCC - has helped TERI to win a substantial share of USD 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.
The report said, "in view of the IPCC's statement last week, the very evident anger of the Indian government at his dismissal of its expert's report and now the revelation of the part played in this fiasco by a senior member of his own TERI staff, it appears that what we may soon be looking at here is not just "Glaciergate" but "Pachaurigate".
