John Tierney, science reporter at the New York Times, is one of the better reporters out there; in the past he’s attracted the wrath of the climate change true believers. And he makes a lot of good points in his piece in today’s paper as he defends both IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri and Al Gore from some of the less informed and less fair criticisms of their business links.
But he misses the elephant in the room. It’s not that Pachauri has business ties to companies that will make money if anti-climate change policies are adopted. Those ties are intellectually irrelevant if ethically questionable; scientific statements should be evaluated on the basis of science. If a tobacco company-sponsored study on smoking is good science, we should pay attention. If a study sponsored by Mothers Against Drunk Driving is hooey, we should discount it whatever the motives of those behind it.
But Tierney’s point, however well taken, doesn’t get to the real case against Pachauri: the institute he heads, TERI, has been using the fraudulent claim of Himalayan glacier melt to raise money and inject hysteria (the fierce urgency of now) into the policy debate. That’s wrong, whether Pachauri is making money out of it or not.
Forget ‘conflict of interest.’ The problem here is twofold: lying for gain, and deliberately injecting false information into public debates to score policy points.
Oh, and there is one other matter. When the well respected Indian scientist V.K. Raina came out with a thoroughly documented and careful report on the state of the Himalayan glaciers, Pachauri denounced him for practicing ‘voodoo science’. He would like an apology. He should get one.