Last November, U.N. climate chief Rajendra Pachauri delivered a blistering rebuke to India’s environment minister for casting doubt on the notion that global warming was causing the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers. ‘We have a very clear idea of what is happening,’ the chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) told the Guardian newspaper. ‘I don’t know why the minister is supporting this unsubstantiated research. It is an extremely arrogant statement.’ Then again, when it comes to unsubstantiated research it’s hard to beat the IPCC, whose 2007 report insisted that the glaciers-which feed the rivers that in turn feed much of South Asia-were very likely to nearly disappear by the year 2035. ‘The receding and thinning of Himalayan glaciers,’ it wrote in its supposedly definitive report, ‘can be attributed primarily to the [sic] global warming due to increase in anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases.’ It turns out that this widely publicized prediction was taken from a 2005 report from the World Wildlife Fund, which based it on a comment by Indian glacier expert Syed Hasnain from 1999. Mr. Hasnian now says he was ‘misquoted.’ Even more interesting is that the IPCC was warned in […]