Plot or Not: AGW/ACC Edition

The head of the UN’s climate change body is under pressure to resign after one of his strongest allies in the environmental movement said his judgment was flawed and called for a new leader to restore confidence in climatic science.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has insisted that he will remain in post for another four years despite having failed to act on a serious error in the body’s 2007 report.

John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK , said that Dr Pachauri should have acted as soon as he had been informed of the error, even though issuing a correction would have embarrassed the IPCC on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit.

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Philip Campbell, editor in chief of Nature, stepped down from the panel yesterday, just hours after its official launch, after an interview emerged in which he said there was nothing to suggest a cover-up by climate scientists at the University of East Anglia.

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Tragedy and comedy have entered the climate change stage hand in hand.

The tragic figure is Professor Phil Jones, the 57-year-old scientist at the heart of the climate change e-mail scandal. In an interview with London's Sunday Times newspaper, he said he contemplated suicide just before the start of December's Copenhagen climate change summit, when skeptics were emboldened by the publication of hacked e-mails from the influential climatic research unit he led. “There were death threats,” he said. “People said I should go and kill myself. They said they knew where I lived. I did think about it, yes. About suicide.”

The comic figure is Rajendra Pachauri, the 69-year-old chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. His fight to save his career over a faulty IPCC report about melting glaciers did not prevent him from publishing a novel – his first – that drips with sex and romance.

With climate change science already under fire, neither of these developments will help shore up credibility.

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Bill Nye ‘The Science Guy’ appeared Wednesday on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and leveled some serious accusations against global warming skeptics, primarily that not adhering to a belief in anthropomorphic global warming constitutes unpatriotic behavior and that being skeptical of global warming is equivalent to “denying science.” Nye first said in the beginning of the interview that skepticism of global arming was “almost unpatriotic” and at the end reiterated that he found skeptical behavior “inappropriate” and reiterated his intellectural opponents are unpatriotic.

Nye, who is not a climate scientist, in part supported his claim that global warming science is settled by citing the Nobel Peace Prize the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) won for its work: “They got a scientific prize for making a discovery… this is a big deal, they discovered climate change through all sorts of evidence.” However, that statement is inaccurate because the Peace Prize, which the IPCC shared with Al Gore, is not a scientific award.

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