Rajendra Pachauri obituary

Climate scientist who pioneered the global work of the IPCC as its chair and tackled the 'climategate' hacking scandalTo stave off the worst impacts of the climate crisis - already being felt in the form of extreme weather, fires and floods - we have only about a decade to cause greenhouse gas emissions to peak and then fall rapidly. That we know this is largely thanks to one global organisation, a loose collection of hundreds of academics around the world that has amassed our knowledge of the climate for more than 30 years.The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, convened in 1988 by the UN and the World Meteorological Organization, is made up of the world's leading experts on climate science, who draw on thousands of academic papers to prepare comprehensive assessment reports about every five to seven years. Those reports are the gold standard, representing the summation of our knowledge of how the climate system works, and how we are affecting it. Continue reading...