UN chief knew about climate change error EIGHT WEEKS before summit

The controversial UN chief who admitted lying about climate change knew about his error two months before announcing it, according to reports last night.

Last week Dr Rajendra Pachauri was forced into a humiliating climbdown over claims the Himalayan glaciers could vanish within 25 years.

He said he had only just learned his prognosis had been refuted by experts, after the report in which they were included formed a key plank of proposals at the Copenhagen climate change summit.

But last night it emerged he had been told he was wrong about his date of 2035 by leading glacier experts eight weeks before the summit began.

Most glacier experts believe the Himalayan ice is so thick and at such high altitude it would take at least several hundred years to melt and some glaciers are currently growing.

Despite this, Dr Pachauri\'s alarmist claims appeared in an influential assessment by the Intergovernmetnal Panel on Climate Change delivered to world leaders.

The 938-page report stated: \'Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.\'

The IPCC insisted contained their report contained the latest and most detailed evidence yet of the risks of man-made climate change.

But a prominent science journalist told The Times he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November after leading experts said he was 300 years out, and he ignored it.

Pallava Bagla who writes for the journal Science, interviewed him again last week and said in a taped conversation: \'I pointed it out [the error] to you in several emails, several discussion yet you decided to overlook it. Was that so that you did not want to destabilise what was happening in Copenhagen?\'

Dr Pachauri replied: \'Not at all, not at all. As it happens we were all terribly preoccupied with a lot of events.

We were working round the clock with several things that had to be done in Copenhagen. It was only when the story broke, I think in December, we decided to, well, early in January - that we decided to go into it.\'

And within three or four days we were able to come up with a clear and very honest and objective assessment of what happened.\'

Dr Pachauri has also been accused of using the error to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, The Times reported.

Mr Bagla claimed he had been told by Dr Pachauri that the problem would be dealt with in the IPCC\'s next report due in 2013 or 2014.

The 70-year-old Indian who trained as a railway engineer before acquiring PHDs in industrial engineering and economics even dismissed an Indian Government report suggesting the glaciers were not melting as \'voodoo science\'.

In a statement last week he apologised for the error in the report. \'In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly\', he said.

The chair, vice-chairs, and co-chairs of the IPCC regret the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures in this instance.\'
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