International Bureaucrats Lie About Global Warming

By Doug Bandow

If what global warming scaremongers said was true, the planet would be in peril.  But if what they said was true was, in fact, true, they wouldn’t have to lie about the process.

Walter Russell Mead points out in American Interest:

After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding data, and making inflated, bogus claims resting on, in some cases, no scientific basis at all. This latest story in the London Times is yet another shocker; the IPCC’s claims that the rainforests were going to disappear as a result of global warming are as bogus and fraudulent as its claims that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.  It seems as if a scare story could grab a headline, the IPCC simply didn’t care about whether it was reality-based.

With this in mind, ‘climategate’ – the scandal over hacked emails by prominent climate scientists – looks sinister rather than just unsavory.  The British government has concluded that University of East Anglia, home of the research institute that provides the global warming with much of its key data, had violated Britain’s Freedom of Information Act when scientists refused to hand over data so that critics could check their calculations and methods.  Breaking the law to hide key pieces of data isn’t just ‘science as usual,’ as the global warming movement’s embattled defenders gamely tried to argue.  A cover-up like that suggests that you indeed have something to conceal.

The urge to make the data better than it was didn’t just come out of nowhere.  The global warmists were trapped into the necessity of hyping the threat by their realization that the actual evidence they had – which, let me emphasize, all hype aside, is serious, troubling and establishes in my mind the need for intensive additional research and investigation, as well as some prudential steps that would reduce CO2 emissions by enhancing fuel use efficiency and promoting alternative energy sources – was not sufficient to get the world’s governments to do what they thought needed to be done. Hyping the threat increasingly doesn’t look like an accident: it looks like it was a conscious political strategy.

The political war over climate change is ending.  The alarmists have lost.  The campaign won’t disappear any time soon.  But unless the movement sheds its discredited leaders and brings its policy prescriptions into line with the evidence, the center and even the moderate left will begin running in the opposite direction.  After all, in today’s political climate, what politician wants to tell the American people that he or she intends to wreck the U.S. economy for a lie?

Doug Bandow, American Conservative Defense Alliance

View the original article at Campaign for Liberty

The Death of Global Warming

FROM-The American Interest
Walter Russel Mead
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

The global warming movement as we have known it is dead. Its health had been in steady decline during the last year as the once robust hopes for a strong and legally binding treaty to be agreed upon at the Copenhagen Summit faded away. By the time that summit opened, campaigners were reduced to hoping for a ‘politically binding’ agreement to be agreed that would set the stage for the rapid adoption of the legally binding treaty. After the failure of the summit to agree to even that much, the movement went into a rapid decline.

The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad politics.

After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding data, and making inflated, bogus claims resting on, in some cases, no scientific basis at all. This latest story in the London Times is yet another shocker; the IPCC’s claims that the rainforests were going to disappear as a result of global warming are as bogus and fraudulent as its claims that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. It seems as if a scare story could grab a headline, the IPCC simply didn’t care about whether it was reality-based.

With this in mind, ‘climategate’ — the scandal over hacked emails by prominent climate scientists — looks sinister rather than just unsavory. The British government has concluded that University of East Anglia, home of the research institute that provides the global warming with much of its key data, had violated Britain’s Freedom of Information Act when scientists refused to hand over data so that critics could check their calculations and methods. Breaking the law to hide key pieces of data isn’t just ’science as usual,’ as the global warming movement’s embattled defenders gamely tried to argue. A cover-up like that suggests that you indeed have something to conceal.

The urge to make the data better than it was didn’t just come out of nowhere. The global warmists were trapped into the necessity of hyping the threat by their realization that the actual evidence they had — which, let me emphasize, all hype aside, is serious, troubling and establishes in my mind the need for intensive additional research and investigation, as well as some prudential steps that would reduce CO2 emissions by enhancing fuel use efficiency and promoting alternative energy sources — was not sufficient to get the world’s governments to do what they thought needed to be done. Hyping the threat increasingly doesn’t look like an accident: it looks like it was a conscious political strategy.

Now it has failed. Not everything that has come out of the IPCC and the East Anglia Climate Unit is false, but enough of their product is sufficiently tainted that these institutions can best serve the cause of fighting climate change by stepping out of the picture. New leadership might help, but everything these two agencies have done will now have to be re-checked by independent and objective sources.

The global warming campaigners got into this mess because they had a deeply flawed political strategy. They were never able to develop a pragmatic approach that could reach its goals in the context of the existing international system. The global warming movement proposed a complex set of international agreements involving vast transfers of funds, intrusive regulations in national economies, and substantial changes to the domestic political economies of most countries on the planet. As it happened, the movement never got to the first step — it never got the world’s countries to agree to the necessary set of treaties, transfers and policies that would constitute, at least on paper, a program for achieving its key goals.

Even if that first step had been reached, the second and third would almost surely not have been. The United States Congress is unlikely to pass the kind of legislation these agreements would require before the midterm elections, much less ratify a treaty. (It takes 67 senate votes to ratify a treaty and only 60 to overcome a filibuster.) After the midterms, with the Democrats expected to lose seats in both houses, the chance of passage would be even more remote — especially as polls show that global warming ranks at or near the bottom of most voters’ priorities. American public opinion supports ‘doing something’ about global warming, but not very much; support for specific measures and sacrifices will erode rapidly as commentators from Fox News and other conservative outlets endlessly hammer away. Without a commitment from the United States to pay its share of the $100 billion plus per year that poor countries wanted as their price for compliance, and without US participation in other aspects of the proposed global approach, the intricate global deals fall apart.

Since the United States was never very likely to accept these agreements and ratify these treaties, and is even less prepared to do so in a recession with the Democrats in retreat, even “success” in Copenhagen would not have brought the global warming movement the kind of victory it sought — although it would have created a very sticky and painful political problem for the United States.

But even if somehow, miraculously, the United States and all the other countries involved not only accepted the agreements but ratified them and wrote domestic legislation to incorporate them into law, it is extremely unlikely that all this activity would achieve the desired result. Countries would cheat, either because they chose to do so or because their domestic systems are so weak, so corrupt or so boththat they simply wouldn’t be able to comply. Governments in countries like China and India aren’t going to stop pushing for all the economic growth they can get by any means that will work — and even if central governments decided to move on global warming, state and local authorities have agendas of their own. The examples of blatant cheating would inevitably affect compliance in other countries; it would also very likely erode what would in any case be an extremely fragile consensus in rich countries to keep forking over hundreds of billions of dollars to poor countries — many of whom would not be in anything like full compliance with their commitments.

For better or worse, the global political system isn’t capable of producing the kind of result the global warming activists want. It’s like asking a jellyfish to climb a flight of stairs; you can poke and prod all you want, you can cajole and you can threaten. But you are asking for something that you just can’t get — and at the end of the day, you won’t get it.

The grieving friends and relatives aren’t ready to pull the plug; in a typical, whistling-past-the-graveyard comment, the BBC first acknowledges that even if the current promises are kept, temperatures will rise above the target level of two degrees Celsius — but let’s not despair! The BBC quotes one of its own reporters: “BBC environment reporter Matt McGrath says the accord lacks teeth and does not include any clear targets on cutting emissions. But if most countries at least signal what they intend to do to cut their emissions, it will mark the first time that the UN has a comprehensive written collection of promised actions, he says.”

Gosh! A comprehensive written collection of promised actions! And it’s a first!! Any day now that jellyfish is going to start climbing stairs. Sure, it will be slow at first — but the momentum will build!

The death of global warming (the movement, not the phenomenon) has some important political and cultural consequences in the United States that I’ll be blogging on down the road. Basically, Sarah Palin 1, Al Gore zip. The global warming meltdown confirms all the populist suspicions out there about an arrogantly clueless establishment invoking faked ’science’ to impose cockamamie social mandates on the long-suffering American people, backed by a mainstream media that is totally in the tank. Don’t think this won’t have consequences; we’ll be exploring them together as the days go by.

Pachauri fails to get UK support over ‘unsubstantiated’ climate report claims

Damian Carrington
London Guardian
Monday, February 1st, 2010

Rajendra Pachauri, who has faced criticism as chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change following allegations of inaccurate statements in panel reports, suffered a fresh blow last night when he failed to get the backing of the British government.

A senior government official reiterated Pachauri’s position but stopped short of expressing confidence in him. “The position is that he is the chair and he has indicated that mistakes were made,” the climate change official said. “There is no vacancy at this stage, so there is no issue at this stage.”

The IPCC is required by governments to assess the science and imapct of climate change and its thousands of scientists produce major reports and summaries for policymakers. Its last report in 2007 concluded that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities were 90% certain to be causing observed global warming and was accepted by all governments.

“It is clearly unfortunate that individual problems with individual papers have been found,” said the official. “But the scientific basis for climate change does not rest on a very small number of papers in which the [IPCC] review process has not been rigorous enough. It relies on thousands and thousands of papers that have been peer reviewed through scientific journals.”

Full article here

UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article

Richard Gray and Rebecca Lefort
London Telegraph
Sunday, January 31st, 2010

The United Nations’ expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world’s mountain tops on a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.

The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming.

The IPCC’s remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.

In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

Full article here

Controversial climate change boss uses car AND driver to travel one mile to office… (but he says YOU should use public transport)

Simon Parry
UK Daily Mail
Sunday, January 31st, 2010

He is the climate change chief whose research body produced a report warning that the glaciers in the Himalayas might melt by 2035 and earned a Nobel Prize for his work – so you might expect Dr Rajendra Pachauri to be doing everything he can to reduce his own carbon footprint.

But as controversy continued to simmer last week over the bogus ‘Glaciergate’ claims in a report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – which he heads – Dr Pachauri showed no apparent inclination to cut global warming in his own back yard.

On Friday, for the one-mile journey from home to his Delhi office, Dr Pachauri could have walked, or cycled, or used the eco-friendly electric car provided for him, known in the UK as G-Wiz.

But instead, he had his personal chauffeur collect him from his £4.5million home – in a 1.8-litre Toyota Corolla.

Hours later, the chauffeur picked up Dr Pachauri from the office of the environmental charity where he is director-general – The Energy and Resources Institute – blatantly ignoring the institute’s own literature, which gives visitors tips on how to reduce pollution by using buses.

Full article here

Climate chief was told of false glacier claims before Copenhagen

Ben Webster
London Times
Saturday, January 30th, 2010

The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.

Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.

The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.

Dr Pachauri, who played a leading role at the summit, corrected the error last week after coming under media pressure. He told The Times on January 22 that he had only known about the error for a few days. He said: “I became aware of this when it was reported in the media about ten days ago. Before that, it was really not made known. Nobody brought it to my attention. There were statements, but we never looked at this 2035 number.”

Full article here

Global Warming Fraud Collapses Amidst Deception And Scandal

Even vehemently pro-AGW news outlets admit its game over for the IPCC

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, January 27, 2010

The multi-billion dollar global warming fraud is truly beginning to crumble, with even vehement man-made climate change advocates like the BBC acknowledging that the credibility of the IPCC is shot.

“The bloggers are all over the UN IPCC 2007 report, the bible of global warming, which predicted all manner of dire outcomes for our planet unless we got a grip on rising temperatures — and it seems to be crumbling in some pretty significant areas,” writes the BBC’s Andrew Neil in an article entitled ‘The dam is cracking‘.

Climategate was merely the opening salvo in a series of seemingly never-ending scandals that have engulfed the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change over the last few weeks.

The first major blow came when the IPCC had to admit that their 2007 forecast that the Himalayan Glaciers would disappear by 2035 was completely wrong. The absurd claim was first made by a little-known Indian scientist in an interview for an online magazine, invoked by the World Wildlife Fund, and then copied into the 2007 IPCC report with no investigation as to its accuracy.

In reality, even if IPCC estimates of global warming are proven correct, which is severely doubtful in light of their recent track record, the glaciers will be around for at least centuries longer.

“In fact, the IPCC’s 2007 report cites WWF documents as “evidence” at least another 15 times,” writes Andrew Bolt.

“Elsewhere it cites a non-scientific, non-peer-reviewed paper from another activist body, the International Institute for Sustainable Development, as its sole proof that global warming could devastate African agriculture.”

It then emerged that the scientist who first made the claim, Syed Hasnain, is now employed by The Energy Research Institute – headed by IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri. Just two weeks ago TERI won up to $500,000 from the Carnegie Corporation to study Hasnain’s bogus claim.

Pachauri, portrayed as an authoritative scientists by some when in fact he is a railway engineer, only made himself look worse by initially attacking climate skeptics as “arrogant” and believers in “voodoo science” when the glaciers issue was highlighted. Pachauri later had to retract his words but still refuses to apologize. Pachauri’s reputation is in tatters and he is under intense pressure to resign.

The credibility of the IPCC was further devastated when it was revealed that their predictions on the Amazon rainforest were also lifted wholesale from WWF propaganda with no independent verification whatsoever.

Amidst all this scandal, new peer-reviewed studies have emerged to confirm the obvious – the world had ice age activity even when levels of greenhouse gases were four times higher than the level of our pre-industrial times.

Global warming is heading to the same dustbin of history as Y2K, SARS and swine flu – another manufactured scare peddled primarily to make vast profits for corrupt elitists at the expense of the general public. The entire fraud is collapsing under the weight of its own lies as new revelations of IPCC deception and bias emerge on an almost daily basis thanks to the sterling work of climate skeptics who have had their convictions vindicated.

The Intergovernmental Perjury over Climate Catastrophe

Melanie Philips
The Spectator
Tuesday, January 26, 2010

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is seeing its reputation disappear faster than a fish down a polar bear’s gullet.

Christopher Booker reports in the Sunday Telegraph that, following the IPCC’s grovelling admission that its 2007 statement that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 had no scientific basis and that its inclusion in the report reflected a ‘poor application’ of IPCC procedures, more has come to light about the bogus ‘research’ on which the IPCC based this claim – which came from a report in New Scientist which was in turn merely drawn from a phone interview with a little-known Indian scientist, and that scientist’s links with the IPCC’s chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri:

…the scientist from whom this claim originated, Dr Syed Hasnain, has for the past two years been working as a senior employee of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the Delhi-based company of which Dr Pachauri is director-general. Furthermore, the claim – now disowned by Dr Pachauri as chairman of the IPCC – has helped TERI to win a substantial share of a $500,000 grant from one of America’s leading charities, along with a share in a three million euro research study funded by the EU.At the same time, Dr Pachauri has personally been drawn into a major row with the Indian government, previously among his leading supporters, after he described as ‘voodoo science’ an official report by the country’s leading glaciologist, Dr Vijay Raina, which dismissed Dr Hasnain’s claims as baseless. Now that the IPCC has disowned the prediction made by his employee, Dr Pachauri has been castigated by India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, and called on by Dr Raina to apologise for his ‘voodoo science’ charge. At a stormy Delhi press conference on Thursday, Dr Pachauri was asked whether he intended to resign as chairman of the IPCC – on whose behalf he collected a Nobel Peace Prize two years ago, alongside Al Gore – but he refused to answer questions on this fast-escalating row.

Meanwhile, in the Mail on Sunday David Rose reveals that the co-ordinating lead author of the IPCC report chapter which contained this falsehood about the vanishing Himalayan glaciers, Dr Murari Lal, has admitted that he was well aware that this statement was not backed up by peer-reviewed research but included it anyway purely to put political pressure on world leaders. He said:

It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.

The fact that it was totally untrue appears to have been irrelevant. Also yesterday, the Sunday Times revealed yet another false claim by the IPCC which has now bitten the dust. This was the claim that man-made global warming was linked to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods:

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny – and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report’s own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month’s Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for compensation of $100 billion (£62 billion) from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions.

Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change minister, has suggested British and overseas floods – such as those in Bangladesh in 2007 – could be linked to global warming. Barack Obama, the US president, said last autumn: ‘More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.’ Last month Gordon Brown, the prime minister, told the Commons that the financial agreement at Copenhagen ‘must address the great injustice that . . . those hit first and hardest by climate change are those that have done least harm’.

This claim was exploded in a 2006 study by disaster impact expert Robin Muir-Wood, who found that the link between man-made global warming and increases in climatic storms didn’t stand up. The IPCC actually incorporated part of his study into its own report – but quoted it selectively to produce the opposite conclusion. The IPCC also failed to reveal in advance of the Copenhagen summit that the non-peer reviewed paper on which its claim of the link had been based had issued a caveat when it was finally published in 2008, which stated:

We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.

Such selectivity and distortion by the IPCC challenge the excuse for its behaviour now being trotted out that errors are bound to creep into such a voluminous body of work from time to time. These are not errors made in good faith. These are falsehoods resulting from a mindset which ruthlessly makes use of any claims that back up AGW theory – with any frailties or contradictions in the evidence deliberately concealed. The Global Warming Policy Foundation reports that the suggestion that the Himalayan glaciers falsehood was an uncharacteristic mistake is not borne out by the evidence, which reveals that doubts and questions are routinely ignored in the IPCC’s review process. But of course. Facts cannot be allowed to get in the way of the theory.

Thus the IPCC, the ‘scientific’ body whose apocalyptic predictions of planetary doom have driven the politics of the entire western world off the rails. Who can possibly take this body — or anyone who has supported it and promoted its falsehoods as unchallengeable truths — seriously ever again?

View  the original article at The Spectator

Investigate Pachauri now

Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
Monday, January 25th, 2010

The IPCC and its deeply conflicted chairman are starting to smell very badly, and not just because of Climategate:

The chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Rajendra Pachauri’s Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion’s share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers…

The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 – an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report.

Humbled – but not humble. In fact, Pachauri was at first suspiciously determined to defend this preposterous error, based on a wild and unsubstantiated claim by a single scientist in a telephone interview, and to smear the scientists and critics who pointed it out. Remember his initial responses:

Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC’s chairman, has hit back, denouncing the Indian government report as “voodoo science” lacking peer review.

And again:

However, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, told the Guardian: “We have a very clear idea of what is happening. I don’t know why the minister is supporting this unsubstantiated research. It is an extremely arrogant statement.”

Even more suspiciously, Pachauri’s TERI employed the very scientist whose airy claim in 1999 had started the whole Himalayan scare:

The Carnegie money was … acknowledged by TERI in a press release, issued on January 15, just before the glacier scandal became public, in which Pachauri repeated the claims of imminent glacial melt… The same release also quoted Dr Syed Hasnain, the glaciologist who, back in 1999, made the now discredited claim that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. He now heads Pachauri’s glaciology unit at TERI which sought the grants and which is carrying out the glacier research.

Critics point out that Hasnain, of all people, should have known the claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 was bogus because he was meant to be a leading glaciologist specialising in the Himalayas.

In fact, and making this scandal even worse, is the admission that the IPCC deliberately included the Himalayan claim in its 2007 report for political purposes, despite knowing it was suspect at best:

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action..”.

And let’s not forget which warmist dupe – and wannabe UN secretary general – has also tipped Pachauri’s TERI another $1 million of taxpayers’ funds:

Australian Prime Minister Mr. Kevin Michael Rudd announced $1 million contribution to The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) …

When wild and baseless scares are pushed by a man who makes serious money from them, it’s time to call in the auditors. Pachauri may be innocent of any wrong doing, but only a fool would be blind to the danger of corruption when so many millions are being thrown at pushers of the warming faith.

Question: could the Nobel Prize be withdrawn from the IPCC if more such revelations come to light?

Full article here

Pachauri must resign at once as head of official climate science panel

Geoffrey Lean
London Telegraph
Monday, January 25th, 2010

It is time for the embattled Rajendra Pachauri to resign as Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC). He is steadfastly refusing to go, but his position is becoming more and more untenable by the day, and the official climate science body will continue to leach credibility while he remains in charge.

When on Friday I wrote for my Daily Telegraph column (published yesterday) that he was “at best one more blunder away from having to resign”, I did not expect other errors to come to light quite so fast. But, as I blogged yesterday, four more have now been reported from the part of the latest IPCC report on Himalayan glaciers that contained the notorious – and now withdrawn – claim that they would disappear by 2035. And there are now reports that it erred in relying on an unpublished report in linking natural disasters like flood and hurricanes to global warming. All appear much less serious than the original Himalayan howler, but they add to the impression of sloppiness at the IPCC.

Pachauri’s reaction to the original revelation was widely reported to be that he claimed to have “absolutely no responsibility” for the mistake. But – leaving aside the obvious fact that, as Chairman, he is ultimately responsible for the content and standards of the report – he is himself rapidly emerging as much more of an issue than even a few errors in the 3000 word document. Much of his trouble, rightly, stems from his outrageous reaction to an Indian paper late last year which suggested that the glaciers were not vanishing quickly – dismissing it as “voodoo science” and adding, hubristically: “We have a very clear idea of what is happening in the Himalayas.”

He has reacted equally robustly to calls for his resignation, saying he has “no intention” of quitting and adding: “I know a lot of climate sceptics are after my blood, but I’m in no mood to oblige them”. But it is not just the sceptics who are unhappy, and he has long been a controversial figure. Environmentalists were outraged when he became chairman of the IPCC in 2002, ousting the enormously respected Dr Robert Watson (now Defra’s chief scientist), after lobbying by the George W.Bush administration: Exxon had sent the White House a memo asking for Watson to be “replaced at the request of the US” as being “too aggressive” on climate change. Al Gore called him the “let’s drag out feet candidate”.

Full article here