As the climategate scandal unfolds, Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change, has offered a rather perverse defense of some the IPCC’s top and most influential climate scientists. In an interview reported on in the UK Guardian, Pachauri, who has no particular expertise in either climate science or the hard sciences more generally (he actually has a Ph.D. in economics from NC State) blames the whole problem on the fact that the scandal ridden scientists wrote their communications down. In other words, the problem for Pachauri is not that they were colluding to cook the climate books but that they did it over email. Here’s what he had to say:
“I really think people should be discreet ? in this day and age
anything you write, even privately, could become public and to put
anything down in writing is, to say the least, indiscreet ? It is
another matter to talk about this to your friends on the telephone or
person to person but to put it down in writing was indiscreet.”
Pachauri also says that he has no plans to investigate the scientists involved. In fact, it appears that the main problem he has is with the people who brought the emails to light. According to the Guardian:
“He said an independent inquiry into the emails would achieve little, but there should be a criminal investigation into how the emails came to light.”
For an excellent article on the significance of the climategate scandal for both climate science and the IPCC see this article from the UK Telegraph.
(Hat tip to former colleague Chad Adams for calling my attention to the Telegraph article.)
