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IPCC chairman dismisses climate report spoiler campaign Rajendra K Pachauri says ‘rational people’ will be convinced by the science of the forthcoming blockbuster climate report Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent the guardian.com, Friday 20 September 2013 The chairman of the United Nations‘ climate panel has dismissed a contrarian spoiler campaign targeting next week’s blockbuster report, saying “rational people” will be convinced by the science.

In his first public comments on the organised effort to discredit the major climate change report ahead of its release on 27 September, Rajendra K Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said he was confident the high standards of the science in the report would make the case for climate action.

“There will be enough information provided so that rational people across the globe will see that action is needed on climate change,” Pachauri told a conference call.

“I really wouldn’t want to say anything about any perceived effort for a pushback,” he went on. “We are doing our job and we are reasonably confident that rational people in government and all over the world will see the merit of the work that has been done.”

Pachauri spoke to a small group of reporters on a conference call organised by the Natural Resources Defence Council ahead of a visit to the US by India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh.

Organisations that dismiss the science behind climate change and oppose curbs on greenhouse gas pollution have made a big push to cloud the release of the IPCC report, the result of six years of work by hundreds of scientists.

Those efforts this week extended to promoting the fiction of a recovery in the decline of Arctic sea ice.

The IPCC assessments, produced every six or seven years, are seen as the definitive report on climate change, incorporating the key findings from some 9,000 articles published in scientific journals. But an error slipped into the 900-plus pages of the last such report in 2007 – the false claim the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035. That small mistake turned into a public relations disaster for the IPCC.

Pachauri also came under a barrage of personal criticism for his handling of the mistake.

The IPCC chairman suggested climate contrarians and those who oppose action on climate change deliberately exaggerated the significance of that error to try to damage the work of the IPCC – and so hurt the case for climate action.

He pointed out that the single error “was buried somewhere in the middle” and had never made its way to the summary for policymakers – prepared to guide government officials preparing for future climate change – or other areas of the report.

“It doesn’t in any way retract from the reality that glaciers in the Himalayas are melting. They are receding,” he said. “This is an error that should have been seen in a balanced way and should not have been made so much of.”……..http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/sep/19/ipcc-chairman-climate-report