Climategate: Inhofe Raises the Temperature

Senator James Inhofe has just turned up the heat on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the UN NGO that is responsible for collecting and reviewing the evidence for anthropogenic climate change — and its chairman, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri.

Wednesday afternoon, Senator Inhofe gave a floor speech (watch on YouTube here) in which he summarized the rapidly accumulating evidence of severe flaws in the IPCC assessment reports, along with the other issues uncovered by the release of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) emails.

Inhofe, a long-time critic of the evidence for anthropogenic global warming and of the “cap and trade” carbon exchange schemes, used his floor speech to point out to the Senate that the IPCC report included the infamous “2035” date for the disappearance of glaciers from the Himalayas — which the IPCC has now been forced to retract.

As Inhofe put it, the Obama administration considers the IPCC reports the “gold standard” of climate change science, but the continuing revelations about flaws in the science have led to a “crisis of confidence” in the IPCC process. This followed Inhofe having built an igloo with his family and marking it “Al Gore’s New Home” after the record-breaking Washington, D.C., blizzard this week. (An effort for which he and his whole family were nominated “Worst Person in the World” by Keith Olbermann.)

Inhofe’s speech didn’t directly call for any particular action on the part of Congress, but it did point out that the Obama administration has asserted that if a cap and trade bill doesn’t pass, it could achieve similar effects by a simple finding by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that carbon dioxide is a pollutant — a finding the EPA actually made late last year. However, as Inhofe pointed out in his on-floor remarks, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson had testified to his committee that the CO2 finding was largely based on the IPCC reports.

Inhofe noted that Pachauri had testified on climate change in front of his committee, saying:

Dr. Pachauri should come clean and respond directly to the numerous charges made against himself and the IPCC. Given that Dr. Pachauri has testified before Congress, including the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, we should hear directly from him as soon as possible as to how he can salvage the IPCC’s vanishing credibility.