Air has gone out of climate change movement

From an op-ed Globe and Mail report:

As the science scandals keep coming, the air has gone out of the climate-change movement.

In 2007, the most comprehensive report to date on global warming, issued by the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a shocking claim: The Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035.

The glacier story was reported around the world. Last December, a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group, warned, “The deal reached at Copenhagen will have huge ramifications for the lives of hundreds of millions of people who are already highly vulnerable due to widespread poverty.”

But the claim was rubbish, and the world's top glaciologists knew it.

It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF itself.

When its background came to light on the eve of Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, shrugged it off.

But now, even leading scientists and environmental groups admit the IPCC is facing a crisis of credibility that makes the Climategate affair look like small change.

More here.