Pachauri patiently rebuts bias charges (from Inhofe) - Reuters

[Eugene]

Source: Reuters

Pachauri patiently rebuts bias charges
Fri Oct 12, 2007 2:14pm EDT

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO (Reuters) - "Pass me the microphone when
he's finished, please," Rajendra Pachauri leant over
and asked me after a U.S. skeptic accused his U.N.
climate panel of exaggerating the threat of global
warming.

Pachauri, an Indian scientist who heads the panel
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday with
ex-U.S. Vice President Al Gore, had just been
accused at U.N. talks in Nairobi of failing to
reply to a letter from U.S. Republican Sen. James
Inhofe.

-snip-

Inhofe, who once famously said the threat of
catastrophic climate change was "the greatest
hoax ever perpetrated on the American people",
has been sharply critical of the IPCC. At the
time, November 2006, he was the outgoing
chairman of the Committee on Environment and
Public Works.

A few days later Pachauri sent an e-mail to Morano,
which he also copied to me and to Paal Prestrud,
a Norwegian climate scientist who arranged the
debate, and attached a letter replying to Inhofe
dated December 24, 2005.

-snip-

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL128894720071012

[PATRICK]

1. Global warming denial

in the US is extremely analogous to tsunami warning practices where, once there is a cause such as seismic disturbance, the system would rather take a denial approach, wait and see, rather than disturb business as usual or allow people to think of their location as risky. An Indian scientist who raised one normal alarm which did not produce a disaster was thumped so that the next time there was to be no crying of wolf, no disruption of the delusion that it won't happen.

The burden should not ever be on the one scientist or system whose job it simply is to save people with timely facts. The burden is on the murderous pro-active indifference that does not get discredited enough at all after the disaster shocks people back to reality. Then the lone scientists is a hero or "visionary" simply because he had the nerve to do the basic job, but not at all to advocate to people to change their lifestyle in the long term. The villains rebound, the stubborn problem of enforced human blindness always compromises basic common sense. The villains get to murder the suckers with impunity. The one who tries to do his job gets acclaim. The survivors slink back to old habits.

Time to learn the hard way is running out or has already. The bias against the few truth-tellers is overwhelmingly disastrous.