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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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Comment on this article Yale
recruits leading global warming expert If there are such things as celebrity climate scientists, Rajendra Pachauri is one of them. Pachauri, an engineer and economist by training, chairs the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. He also directs the prominent Energy and Resources Institute in India. Now, he can add another business card to his collection: beginning in July, he will head the new Yale Climate and Energy Institute (YCEI). Asked why he took the job, Pachauri says, wryly: "I was underemployed." Yale professors have been conducting climate change research for many years. The new institute -- formed through the efforts of numerous faculty members and supported by an anonymous $3 million donation -- will better coordinate that research and encourage collaborations. According to Steven Girvin, Yale's deputy provost for science and technology, a first call for seed proposals has gone out, and there are tentative plans to hold a large international conference within the next two years. YCEI will also encourage collaboration across fields. "Climate change is a multidisciplinary problem," says Pachauri; you can't "come up with clear directions for action unless you put everything together." Pachauri taught a semester at the environment school in 2000. He received an honorary degree from the university in 2008. Juggling
his three jobs will mean Pachauri can only spend half his time at Yale. But
YCEI's members believe they've hired the right man. "There's an old saying,"
says Girvin. "If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it." Climate change: fact or fiction? I am disappointed to read that Yale has adopted the political dogma regarding climate change, which is shameful because it represents efforts that are severely lacking in scientific integrity and, more broadly, intellectual integrity. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been wracked with scandal. The scientists at Yale are surely aware that an ever-growing contingent of their peers questions man's role in the causes of climate change. I fear that the quest for grants has compromised many in the scientific community. I hope I am wrong.
Do tell I was interested to read in Henry R. Savage's comment that "the causes of climate change and man's role are very uncertain at this point" -- rather a surprise to me, since I had thought the issue was long settled. Mr. Savage would have interested me still more if he had offered anything to support his claim that "an ever-growing contingent of scientists question the dogma" or if he had refuted, point by point, the evidence given by former U.S. vice president Al Gore in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth that we desperately need to alter human acts which damage our world.
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