“Skulduggery”

“Rajendra Pachauri, the embattled chairman of the UN’s Nobel Prize-winning climate change panel, lashed out on Thursday at the flurry of attacks on the panel’s credibility, calling climate change sceptics’ criticism ‘skulduggery of the worst kind’. Last month, Mr Pachauri was forced to acknowledge his panel’s prediction that the Himalayan glaciers could completely disappear by 2035 if global warming went unchecked was unsubstantiated and an error, a painful admission from a scientist long treated in his native India as the last word on environmental issues. The pressure on Mr Pachauri has been so great because the damaging revelation came amid a scandal engulfing scientists at the UK’s University of East Anglia. Climate sceptics allege hacked e-mails between scientists that were posted on the internet show some researchers tried to hide data that did not fit with their theories. Mr Pachauri told the Financial Times that recent assaults on the reputation of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – and on his personal probity – were ‘carefully orchestrated”, with the aim of stalling international action on global warming.”