Is Pachauri losing the Hindustan Times?

These are not the best of times for Rajendra Pachauri. The hits just keep coming. Even the Hindustan Times -which has been an alarmist publication par excellence- has of late taken up a skeptical tone, much to my surprise, I admit. On today's front page-

TERI got Rs 56* lakh to run UN climate meetings

 

 

The article says-

New Delhi-based NGO Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), headed by Rajendra K. Pachauri, got funds from the Environment and Forest ministry to conduct meetings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body he chairs.

The IPCC is a UN body comprising scientists from more than 100 countries that provides inputs to policy makers on combating climate change.

Between 2004 and 2006, the environment ministry allocated funds amounting to about Rs 56 lakh to TERI for conducting IPCC meetings to discuss the impact of climate change, show documents made available to the Hindustan Times.

Or, TERI gained monetarily from work relating to the global body that Pachauri heads.(even the HT now understands the conflict of interest thing -ed)

“There is no conflict of interest,” Pachauri told Hindustan Times .(yes,yes, and the sea is not wet -ed) in an e-mail response. “The first IPCC chairman, Prof Bert Bolin received substantial financial support from the gover-nment of Sweden for his funct-ioning as chairman. The seco-nd chairman, Dr Robert Watson, was in the White House when he was elected chairman and then moved to the World Bank, where the bank not only paid his salary but also provided all support for his functioning.”.(so the ethical problems of IPCC are older than Pachauri -ed)

But Ashish Kothari, founder of the NGO Kalpvariksh, which filed a Right to Information application to ascertain the money given by the ministry to TERI, said there was definite conflict of interest.

“In the context of TERI benefiting from IPCC findings, the government needs to consider the wider issue of conflict of interest involving ministry officials, companies and NGOs,” Kothari said.

Apart from meetings, the government also gave money to TERI to employ staff and set up secretariat support and communication facilities for the IPCC office in India.

Kothari said the government should have asked an organisation not linked with the IPCC to host these meetings.

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Pradipto Ghosh, environment secretary at the time of allocation of these funds and now a TERI fellow.(so very convenient and cosy -and dodgy  -ed), said there was nothing out of place in the allocation of funds. “TERI has been receiving funds from the ministry before and after my tenure,” said Ghosh.

The revelation comes soon after reports that TERI got projects on the basis of IPCC’s faulty predictions on the impact of climate change in the next 30 to 50 years. Some of the predictions, such as Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035, have been found to be wrong.

In fact today's issue carries a second article not favorable to Pachauri-

‘Busy’ IPCC ignored erroneous Himalayan glaciers report

They say when you have lost the HT all that is remaining is the NDTV. It will be interesting to see how long the NDTV keeps ignoring the evidence now piling up by ton loads against their favorite cause -AGW- and their favorite son -Pachauri.

*Update -
          1 lakh = 100,000

Something fishy in Cherrapunji

And the fish that giving off the stink is Subir Bhaumik, among other things BBC's East Indian correspondent.

He turns a tale of over-population and environmental degradation into one of man-made climate change by the magic of his words.

Robin Horbury has the goods on him. Must read. Also read the comments.

A cold to warm a global warming alarmist's heart

This might warm the tender heart of the sweet Ms.Damini Purkayastha.

Britain is bracing itself for one of the coldest winters for a century with temperatures hitting minus 16 degrees Celsius, forecasters have warned.

Also check out couple of excellent articles, one by Richard North-

It has a gigantic supercomputer, 1,500 staff and a £170m-a-year budget. So why does the Met Office get it so wrong?

and the other by Christopher Booker-

The UK's official weather forecasters are determined that winters should be mild, in the face of the frozen facts

-yes, these are the same two pesky ants that are now in Rajendra Pachauri the warmist elephants' trunk.



Update-
     Pachauri can take heart from this-

Q.Can an ant kill the elephant. how?
One of the answers-
It is just a blind belief that by getting through the trunk an ant can kill an elephant.
No ant can get through the trunk as the elephant blows out the entry.

Update 2 -

    On the other hand-

yes it can by moving up an elephant's trunk and going up till its mind...
and-
An ant could get through an elephant trunk and bite its forehead which is a very sensitive part of the elephant.

That describes the current situation - a couple of irksome pests biting at Pachauri's brain.

Environmentalism -wrecking young brains

What the environmentalists are doing to the children(with dollops of help from the media and the state) is nothing short of child abuse.Frank Furedi-

Turning children into Orwellian eco-spies

Frank Furedi recalls being educated through fear in Stalinist Hungary, and is disturbed that the same tactics are now used by environmentalists.
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If you want to know how it works, watch the official opening video of the Copenhagen summit on climate change (see below). Titled ‘Please Help The World’, the four-minute film opens with happy children laughing and playing on swings. A sudden outburst of rain forces them all to rush for cover. The message is clear: the climate threatens our way of life. It then cuts to a young girl who is anxiously watching one TV news broadcaster after another reporting on impending environmental catastrophes. Then we see the young girl tucked into bed, sweetly asleep as she embraces her toy polar bear… but suddenly we’re drawn into her nightmare. She’s on a parched and eerie landscape; she looks frightened and desolate; suddenly the dry earth cracks and she runs in terror towards the shelter of a distant solitary tree. She drops her toy polar bear in a newly formed chasm and yells and screams as she holds on to the tree for dear life. The video ends with groups of children pleading with us: ‘Please help the world.’ You get the picture.

Although this video is a product of the gathering at Copenhagen, it is typical of the kind of propaganda that is constantly directed at children these days. In a world where moral education seems to be exhausted, where teachers are reluctant to judge or to explain the difference between right and wrong, environmentalism has become one of the few values that educators feel comfortable with. Which is why environmentalism and its values now saturate the school curriculum in Britain and some other countries, too.

In medieval times, religion was central to the teaching of virtually every subject. Students were left in no doubt where the church stood on the smallest details of every topic they were learning about. Today, environmental concerns have been integrated into the curriculum, to the point where they often dominate subjects like geography, science and Personal Health and Social Education and intrude into history and literature, too. The growing significance of environmental issues in the school curriculum is directly proportionate to society’s broader moral illiteracy and loss of purpose. Today, even religious studies often appears as a sub-branch of the dogma of environmental alarmism.
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By transmitting their values to children, the scaremongers hope to channel children’s indignation into hostility towards older generations that are apparently destroying the planet. In the Copenhagen video we hear a child talking about her ‘anger’. When she says ‘I am only a child’, the implication is clear: adults have let children down.

Others go a step further and blame older generations for destroying the environment to such an extent that the survival of future generations is put in jeopardy. The message is that adults are greedy or stupid, or both. This downbeat assessment of adults’ behaviour has mutated into outright hostility towards the moral status of the older generations and their so-called ‘wisdom’. ‘Adults have ruined our world’, says the headline to an article in an online magazine targeting children.

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In previous times, it was only totalitarian societies that mobilised children to police their parents’ behaviour. It was Orwellian, Big Brother-style states that tried to harness youngsters’ simplistic views of good and evil to reshape the outlook of adults. But who needs Big Brother when the former prime minister of Britain, Tony Blair, can openly assert that ‘on climate change, it is parents who should listen to their children’? It appears that preying on children’s fears and exploiting their anxiety is now considered to be a form of enlightened education. Yet the future of our children demands that we provide them with existential and moral security. Instead of feeding them on a steady diet of scaremongering, we need to inspire them about our potential to improve the future of our world.

Read the whole thing.

As I have pointed out, the media (see my  case-study of the Hindustan Times) are shamefully fully involved in giving children nightmares and turning them against adults.

An open letter to Damini Purkayastha

An open letter to Damini Purkayastha, who has an utterly clueless article, CITY CRIBS - A GLOBAL WARNING, in the city supplement of the Hindustan Times today.Normally I would not be moved to react, but her photo is cho chweet that I could not help myself but respond.

DAMINI PURKAYASTHA

Cannot find the article online but here is it-

My letter-

Dear Ms. Purkayastha

I was going to write a long rebuttal but what the heck! there are so many things to do and so little time. So, in brief -

1) WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE-
so the warmth you perceive outside your window proves nothing, nada, zilch about global temperatures.If it did, then from the following you would have to conclude that the world is cooling-

In a strange twist, a Washington snowstorm is forcing Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, to make an early departure from a global warming summit here in Denmark.

Due to weather complications #Obama leaves #Copenhagen before #cop15 concludes. Oh - the irony

and he (Obama)landed in washington He had raced back to Washington to avoid the worst of a winter storm barreling through the northeastern United States that threatened to dump up to two feet (61 centimeters) of snow on the last weekend of the Christmas holiday shopping season.

All of which, as I said, says nothing about Global temperatures -because WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE


2) DISEASES AND CLIMATE CHANGE-
This article by Paul Reiter, a professor of medical entomology might be instructive-The inconvenient truth about malaria. Summary - environmentalists claim malaria is moving higher up in latitude where it had not been present before due to global warming. Conclusion -wrong!



As Prof.Reiter says-

The disease was present as high as 2,500m above sea level; the mosquitoes were observed at 3,000m. And Nairobi? 1,680m.


These details are not science. They require no study. They are history. But for activists, they are an inconvenient truth, so they ignore them.

3) AH, THOSE HIMALAYAN GLACIERS, the poster boy of global warming, like Kilimanjaro earlier.

Kilimanjaro snow melting due to GW, as claimed by Al Gore,refuted here(Kilimanjaro's shrinking snow not sign of warming -reuters), but does it matter? Environmentalists and their sleeping partners(ideologically speaking) journalists keep parroting the same lies anyway.



Let me not delve into V.K. Raina's inconvenient study of these glaciers that caused Pachauri to have a fit.
A recent Nasa study-

New Study Turns Up the Heat on Soot's Role in Himalayan Warming





A new modeling study from NASA confirms that when tiny air pollution particles we commonly call soot – also known as black carbon – travel along wind currents from densely populated south Asian cities and accumulate over a climate hotspot called the Tibetan Plateau, the result may be anything but inconsequential.

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"Over areas of the Himalayas, the rate of warming is more than five times faster than warming globally," said William Lau, head of atmospheric sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Based on the differences it’s not difficult to conclude that greenhouse gases are not the sole agents of change in this region. There’s a localized phenomenon at play."

Conclusion -climate science is complex.Very complex. What is not known far,far outstrips what is, though Pachauri and Al Gore(both famous climate scientists, I'm sure) may disagree




4) YOUR FILM RECOMMEDATIONS-

 What to say.

35 Inconvenient Truths -The errors in Al Gore’s movie



A judge in Britain's High Court has ruled that Gore's apocalyptic movie on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, should come with a warning that it promotes "partisan political views" and is riddled with errors.

Wish you would inform your readers about it.


For balance (journalists are supposed to maintain balance,right?)you might recommend -

The Great Global Warming Swindle

and Not Evil Just Wrong

No, Damini, my head is not in the sand or in the media bubble in which everything is the fault of America, West, Bush, neo-conservatives and where Obama, Gore, U.N. and Pachauri are gods.But last time I was in the sand I did glimpse a pretty face looking very anxious about the weather outside of it.

Cheers and regards,
gurmeet

Update-
             corrected a couple of spellings

Hergé on climate change?

 Hergé drew a delightful series of comic strips on a couple of urchins named Quick & Flupke which were later published in form of 12 albums.

Going through one of these albums,Two of a Kind, this one story made me wonder -was Hergé making a veiled statement on the dangers of climate change? Or was he making fun of all those global warming alarmists that have now proliferated more extensively than rabbits?

 (click for larger image)

 Observe - the climate change in the comic is 'cooling'. The stories were published in the 1930's and 40's. Till 1940 the planet is supposed to have warmed(a time when CO2 emissions were low). It then cooled till early 1970's (even though the CO2 emissions were rising rapidly) then warmed again and then has cooled ever since 2001 forcing even the BBC(the Pravda of Global Warmingism) to sit up and take notice.


All of which makes me go -hmmm........

Note-
To our good fortune the series has been reprinted in India by EuroBooks India.