Oh, and this Pachauri is quite a character. It seems that he has been adept at getting money from governments, form big oil, from environmental organizations and from "charitable trusts". And t
The way things are headed (carbon trading and taxes... ) everyone he has been in bed with is bound to make money out of that relationship. And we got his position on the IPCC after "intense lobbying" by the US Bush administration. I wonder if the "carbon trading" schemes date back to that time in 2002.
The scientific media was handling this about few months before it broke in the mainstream. There's general delight that the IPCC is wrong about the glaciers (since, you know, 2035 sucked as a deadline). The cause for the error was believed to be a transcription error between reports. The people who cited the WWF really should have backtracked the citation, obviously. (though I can't find any evidence of skeptic blogs noticing the error before this year, either).
The sad part is that the glacier predictions are now completely uncertain. Obviously they have to be measured. The abstract reads to be generally true, though (a mainstream authority did predict rapid melting, but the melting rate is completely uncertain). I'd really like to read the grant application, though, because a proper grant application would be highlighting all the uncertainty regarding previous predictions and point out the need for better & more testing.
If his grant was bogus, I really hope it shakes out quickly.
$800k is not a lot of money for doing a widespread glacier analysis, though, realise.