THE United States is opposing the reappointment of a leading US
expert to head the UN’s top scientific panel on global warming and
is instead backing a candidate proposed by India, US officials said on
Wednesday.
They said the White House was dissatisfied with Robert Watson,
current chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), who has spoken out on global warming and criticised
President George W. Bush’s response to it.
”This guy is up and we’re supporting the Indian candidate,” one
official said.
”The administration is unhappy with Watson,” the official said on condition of anonymity.
The panel meets in Geneva between April 17-20 to elect a new
30-person bureau, including a new chairman.
A second US official confirmed a report in the New York Times
that said Watson, the chief scientist at the World Bank who was nominated to the UN post by former president Bill Clinton, had
clashed with Bush on a number of issues.
Late on Tuesday, the State Department issued a short statement
saying that Washington was supporting the Indian candidate as well
as nominating an American to be the co-chair of one of the panel’s
working groups.
The statement made no mention of Watson.
”Today, the United States announces its nomination of Dr. Susan
Solomon of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as
co-chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Working Group I, and its support of Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the
candidate proposed by the government of India, as panel Chairman,”
the statement said.
It then listed the qualifications of each candidate.
Pachauri is now the head of the Tata Energy Research Institute
in New Delhi.
The Times reported that auto manufacturers and oil companies saw
Watson, who has long backed cutbacks in emissions of greenhouse
gases, as a foe and believed that Pachauri, who is now a vice
chairman of the IPCC, would be a better choice.
Jennifer Morgan, climate change campaign representative for the
Worldwide Fund for Nature (known as the World Wildlife Fund in the
United States) said the decision to oppose Watson resulted from
”very heavy lobbying by the fossil-fuel lobby.”
Watson ”was named to the job on the basis of his scientific
strengths and credentials,” and to remove him on political grounds
would severely damage the IPCC’s reputation for neutrality, she said.
”The United States is now politicising the science which they
say is so important for the foundation of action,” Morgan said,
speaking from New York.
Meanwhile, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) said it
had a document that proved that Watson’s dismissal had been
engineered by oil company ExxonMobil, which had begun a secret
campaign against the scientist in the first weeks of the Bush
administration.
”It’s bad enough that ExxonMobil controls White House energy and
climate policies,” said Daniel Lashof, science director of the NRDC
Climate Centre. ”Now they want to control the science too.”
The IPCC is a forum of climate experts, oceanographers,
atmospheric physicists, economists and other specialists who are
tasked with providing the best scientific data about man-made
global warming and its effects.
It issued a lengthy report last year under Watson’s chairmanship
that virtually erased any doubts among the mainstream scientific
community about global warming.
The document said the Earth’s atmosphere was warming as a result
of heat-trapping carbon gases released by burning oil, gas and
coal.
The 2001 IPCC report coincided with Bush’s controversial
rejection of the UN’s Kyoto Protocol, which aims at cutting fossil
fuel gases that drive global warming. – Sapa-AFP