The story behind the IPCC director's involvement in winning huge grants to study the impacts of a debunked claim about glaciers melting in the Himalayas had another layer added today when the Times Online (U.K.) reported that he knew about the bogus claim before announcing his latest award to study it.Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the U.N. IPCC, knew about the lack of credibility of the claim that glaciers in the Himalayas would melt by 2035, which was included in the 2007 IPCC report, as far back as prior to the Copenhagen climate conference in December 2009.
But according to Pachauri, he didn't find out about the problematic claim, for which the IPCC was forced to apologize last week, until early January 2010. Pachauri said he didn't recognize the error until "about ten days" before his recent conversation with the Times on January 22nd.
On January 15th, however, approximately three days after the time when Pachauri claimed to have found out about the error, his Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) announced a collaboration with the Global Center of Iceland, funded primarily by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, to study the impacts of Himalayan glacier melt, noting specifically that "credible" science suggested the glaciers could be gone in the next few decades.
So Pachauri knew about the false claim, did not instruct his organization to cancel the collaboration to study the impacts of that false claim, and his organization will be accepting money for research on that false claim.
Furthermore, as we detailed earlier this week, Carnegie's only grant to the Global Center came in September 2008 according to its own grant database, which was worth $500,000.
A call to Carnegie regarding the status of the money for the January 15th collaboration yielded a phone and email response (text here) that they suspended the Global Center grant shortly after it was approved, and that no money has been paid out.
A follow-up email to Carnegie earlier this week has not yet been returned.
The exact date of Carnegie's grant suspension, which was not disclosed to American Solutions, is important in determining the next layer of this story, namely how a collaboration could be announced and financed if the organization primarily funding it had suspended the grant.
It is possible that this latest collaboration is a new grant from Carnegie that has not yet been uploaded to their online database. But when American Solutions contacted Carnegie about this particular collaboration, Carnegie spoke only of the September 2008 grant as being suspended, which suggests the currently-suspended grant is being claimed as financing a new collaboration to study a thoroughly debunked report.
And if this latest collaboration is to be funded with a grant that had been suspended as early as 2008, surely Dr. Pachauri and TERI would have been alerted about its suspension before announcing a new partnership that relies on those funds.
American Solutions is continuing to track this story, and we will post updates as we obtain them.
