Why would respected academics and scientists intentionally distribute false scientific results?
The following article answers this question:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6999975.ece
Theses excerpts from the above article are of interest:
- The chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
- Rajendra Pachauri's Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion's share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers. It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus. The revelation comes just a week after The Sunday Times highlighted serious scientific flaws in the IPCC's 2007 benchmark report on the likely impacts of global warming.
- The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 - an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report.
- The cash was acknowledged by TERI in a press release, issued on January 15, just before the glacier scandal became public, in which Pachauri repeated the claims of imminent glacial melt. It said: ""According to predictions of scientific merit they may indeed melt away in several decades."
The same release also quoted Dr Syed Hasnain, the glaciologist who, back in 1999, made the now discredited claim that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035.
He now heads Pachauri's glaciology unit at TERI which sought the grants and which is carrying out the glacier research. - Critics point out that Hasnain, of all people, should have known the claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 was bogus because he was meant to be a leading glaciologist specialising in the Himalayas.
- Any suggestion that TERI has repeated an unchecked scientific claim without checking it, in order to win grants, could prove hugely embarrassing for Pachauri and the IPCC.
Grant money is the lifeblood of scientific research. The flow of government grants are controlled by politicians and bureaucrats who have political agendas. These political agendas dictate who receives the grants. If you accept grant money and then publish results that conflict with the political agenda your grant flow will cease.
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