Rajendra Pachauri must quit, says Britain’s ex-minister

LONDON - UN’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chief Rajendra Pachauri should quit because of the errors the panel made under his leadership, said Tim Yeo, a former British environment minister.

Yeo said Pachauri had “lost credibility”, Daily Express reported Friday.

An independent review panel from InterAcademy Council, appointed last March, had criticised the Indian chairman of the UN climate panel.

The panel was set up to assess how a few glaring errors — including a prediction that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 — made it into the last such United Nations report released in 2007.

Yeo told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme Thursday: “I think Dr Pachauri should resign. It’s vital that this body is led by someone whose academic and intellectual credentials are unquestioned.”

Pachauri has said he won’t quit unless asked by the full meeting of the 194-member panel in Korea in October.

“Scepticism about climate change is rising more now than at any time in the past 15 years. Clearly there was a serious blunder about the Himalayan glaciers. It damaged the credibility of the IPCC and allowed sceptics to say scientists are making ridiculous and alarmist claims. Dr. Pachauri was involved in that. It makes his position untenable,” Yeo said.

“Sceptics might be on the rise but those of us who have looked at the science objectively for the past 20 years remain convinced that there is serious evidence of a link between rising carbon dioxide concentrations and climate change,” the Daily Express quoted Yeo as saying.