IPCC Chairman Cleared of All Accusations

Just so everyone is quite clear, the much maligned chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri has been completely vindicated against charges of financial wrong-doings and conflicts of interest by an independent panel set up to investigate accusations made by prominent global warming deniers. The review of the IPCC chairman's financial relationships by respected auditors KPMG published today clearly reveals just how scrupulously and honest Pachauri has been since taking up the role of leading the widely respected UN research project.

For a while now, no discussion of climate change or the IPCC appeared complete without reference to Pachauri's "dodgy" business dealings and alleged conflicts of interest. Now it appears there is just one problem for denial-heads: the story was completely untrue. Pachauri’s total additional income over the 20 months reviewed by KPMG amounted to £45,000 from his salary at The Energy and Resources Institute, and a maximum of £2,174 in outside earnings related to his publications and board work. So much for Pachauri's "highly lucrative commercial jobs" amounting to "millions of dollars".

As per usual, however, truth matters little to the main oil and gas lobbyists involved – all conveniently presented in public as so-called “climate skeptics”. No doubt the corporate paid lobbyists will simply move on to the next target of slander and obfuscation in their efforts to discredit legitimate research and concern over global warming. By continuing their war against science and extending their well-funded campaigns of confusion denial-professionals hope to render the public debate over global warming unintelligible by bogged down discourse with irrelevant mud-slinging and anti-science propaganda – even as the scientific debate over human-accelerated global warming has been clear for several years.

Read the full KPMG report: here