The top story on the Globe and Mail right now is about a report from several national academies of science calling for reform of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
I haven’t read the report yet, but the recommendations are about what you’d expect considering all the hysteria over the Climategate non-scandal and the revelation that the 3000-page 4th Assessment Report contained some errors.
Shoring up the peer review process seems to be the main recommendation. Fair enough. Can’t hurt.
But the Globe also makes note of this:
He added that there was concern about the U.N. climate panel’s lack of a conflict of interest policy. The report called for development of a “rigorous conflict of interest policy” that applies to all top IPCC officials.
That line will resonate to most people who dimly remember the scandal whipped up by the UK’s Sunday Telegraph which accused IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri of financial misdeeds. But as I blogged about on Friday, Pachauri was completely exonerated last week, and the Telegraph‘s story looks to be either a big whopping screw up or, worse, a falsehood.
And, the Globe, while making this report about IPCC procedure the top story on their website (and made similar hay of the Telegraph‘s accusations against Pachauri), still hasn’t seen fit to run anything prominent about Pachauri’s exoneration.
So, while a conflict of interest policy is probably a good idea, running a story about a call to reform the IPCC without mentioning that the corruption scandal under which it has been operating has turned out to be a falsehood only serves to reinforce the idea that the IPCC has corruption problems.
Once again, anything that makes the IPCC or climate science look shaky or corrupt is big news. Corrections of the record or mention of the fact that the smear campaigns and non-scandals have done nothing to undermine the main conclusions of the 4th Assessment Report are glossed over.
