Flashback 2006: Morano Debates IPCC’s Chairman Pachauri at UN Conference in Kenya

By: Marc Morano - Climate DepotSeptember 10, 2009 3:53 PM

[More info on 2006 UN debate here. Video of Morano’s opening presentation during debate is here.]

Associated Press: Spokesman for U.S. senator says global warming skeptics are ‘demonized’ – November 14, 2006

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – A spokesman for the U.S. senator who described global warming as a hoax showed up at a gathering of believers Tuesday, claiming scientific dissent on the issue was being suppressed and demonized. One scholar shot back that the Senate aide must be living on another planet. The exchange took place at the U.N. conference on climate change, which has drawn more than 5,000 diplomats, activists and scientists to consider new steps in combating global warming.

“The skeptics who get vocal are vilified,” said Marc Morano, director of communications for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. The committee chairman, Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, has enraged environmentalists by calling global warming alarmist and a hoax.

Morano was invited to be part of a panel discussion on how best to convey the issue of climate change in the media. […] “The shrillness of these skeptics and their numbers have been on the decline,” Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, told The Associated Press before the panel discussion.

But Morano referred to the two-week U.N. conference as an “echo chamber” where “the media and climate alarmists demonize climate skeptics.” Pal Prestrud, director of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research, shot back that “we’re on different planets or maybe even different galaxies.”

More articles about Morano/Pachauri 2006 Global Warming Debate in Kenya:

Pachauri patiently rebuts bias charges – Reuters
Fri Oct 12, 2007 10:58pm IST
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
OSLO (Reuters) -“Pass me the microphone when he’s finished, please,” Rajendra Pachauri leant over and asked me after a U.S. sceptic accused his U.N. climate panel of exaggerating the threat of global warming.

Pachauri, an Indian scientist who heads the panel awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday with ex-U.S. Vice President Al Gore, had just been accused at U.N. talks in Nairobi of failing to reply to a letter from U.S. Republican Sen. James Inhofe.

Pachauri often runs into sharp questioning and gives patient, meticulous replies that may have helped widen acceptance for IPCC conclusions that humanity is “very likely” to blame for climate change and urgent action is needed.

I passed Pachauri the microphone — I was sitting beside him as mediator at a debate among scientists and other experts — and thought he seemed remarkably unflustered by the allegation from Inhofe’s spokesman Marc Morano.

Even Pachauri, who lists two doctorates on his business card and was busy preparing mammoth scientific reports based on the work of 2,500 people published this year, might have problems talking his way out of this one, I thought.

“But I did reply,” Pachauri said to Morano. “If you give me your e-mail I will send you it again.”

Inhofe, who once famously said the threat of catastrophic climate change was “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”, has been sharply critical of the IPCC. At the time, November 2006, he was the outgoing chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works.

A few days later Pachauri sent an e-mail to Morano, which he also copied to me and to Paal Prestrud, a Norwegian climate scientist who arranged the debate, and attached a letter replying to Inhofe dated Dec. 24, 2005.

For more on 2006 debate see here and here.