Work hard, get fired. How many people couldn't sympathize with Dr. Robert T. Watson, who has toiled tirelessly as the head of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and whom the Bush Administration wants to replace with Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian engineer? Whereas Watson is a household name in green domiciles worldwide, Pachauri is a virtual unknown.

The problem, dear Watson, is what you have been working so hard at, which is the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. The way your Euro friends want to implement the Protocol will cost the U.S. about 2.3 percent of its GDP per year, and you seem very enamored of their attitude. At the same time, the Bush people know the Protocol would have no detectable effect on planetary temperature for about 100 years, and that it's pretty silly to promulgate technological regulations in that time frame.

Nonetheless, it is a bit unfair. Watson really is indefatigable, or at least he doesn't show fatigue. At the interminable U.N. meetings, such as the one that slapped together the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, he stayed up all night, a lot of nights, to craft text acceptable to Al Gore. In an earlier incarnation, as a graduate student in atmospheric chemistry at University of Maryland, and later as honcho of NASA's stratospheric chemistry program, his drive and commitment were legendary.

Along the way, though, Watson discovered that his true calling wasn't science so much as it was using science to tell people what to do. And he's proud of it, too. In April 1996 he left his position as associate director of President Clinton's Office of Science and Technology Policy for the World Bank. In an article on the job change, Washington's greenie gossip sheet Global Change wrote:

In his work for the federal government and now the World Bank, Watson retains his involvement with science but can also influence directly and strongly the social issues that matter to him. [Said Watson:] "I find it an order of magnitude more rewarding, much [italics in original] more rewarding.

With regard to his continuing as head of the IPCC, being a vocal supporter of the guys who ran against the current President probably wasn't a good idea. Watson is quoted in the same issue of Global Change as saying that "The [Clinton] Administration's position on the environment [was] absolutely admirable." As for the Republican Congress, Watson said, "Rather than moving things forward constructively, we've been trying to make sure that the things we've been doing were not undone."

In preparation for the mid-December 1997 U.N. meeting in Kyoto, where the infamous Protocol was approved, The Wall Street Journal's John Fialka, whose pro-green sympathies are pretty obvious in his reporting, interviewed Watson, who expressed great displeasure with the proclivity of Americans to question their government, particularly on environmental matters. Watson seemed instead to admire what he deemed as German acceptance of the beneficence of federalized power.

"Watson," wrote Fialka, "finds the difference between Americans and Europeans, who are more concerned about global warming, puzzling." Watson himself was quoted next: "In Germany, when the legislature and government determine there's a problem, the public and industry will follow that decision. The opposite seems true in the U.S. Unless you have industry and the public behind you, you find the government, especially the [Republican] Congress, is unwilling to lead."

None of this is science. Watson is praising the Clinton Administration, criticizing the Republican Congress, and seemingly calling the American people a bunch of dumb bunnies.

How did Watson perform at the nexus of science and policy, which he found, as noted above, "much more rewarding"? In February 1992, in his leadership capacity in NASA's stratospheric chemistry program,  he was featured at a press conference in which he repeatedly announced that ozone depletion was "worse than we thought" because there was an ozone hole in imminent formation over the Northern Hemisphere. Until then, rapid late-winter ozone depletions had been confined to South Polar regions.

Watson knows that "ozone hole" is a misnomer. Stratospheric ozone never depletes to zero as a result of chlorine chemistry. The large depletions that take place for a six-week period in late winter around polar sunrise are surrounded by a global band of enhanced ozone. Soon after sunrise—and long before anyone could get much of a sunburn before freezing to death—old Sol catalyzes the reformation of ozone in the depleted South Polar region.

Watson's statement was based not upon measurements of North Polar ozone, but on a few aircraft measurements of stratospheric chlorine, which can (but does not necessarily) lead to a rapid, temporary ozone depletion. The next day, then-Senator Gore pronounced an "ozone hole over Kennebunkport," President George H. Bush's home.

Gore and Watson go way back. Watson knew that such an ozone depletion was impossible at the latitude of Maine and that there was absolutely no evidence from the NASA aircraft that could indicate even the most remote possibility of such an event. But instead of choosing to advise the public on the whole truth, he chose to let the political process unfold. Within two days, a panicked Senate passed a ban on chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) refrigerants by a vote of 96 to 0, but the Northern Hemisphere ozone hole was a false alarm.

What really ticked off the Bush Administration was Watson's behavior in Shanghai on January 20–21, 2001. There the IPCC adopted its latest compendium on climate change. Watson approved the insertion of a new "storyline" (that's what the IPCC now calls its future projections) that predicted a silly warming of 11°F in the next 100 years. Those of us in the scientific community who had reviewed the document the previous summer never saw this outlandish projection because it was inserted after the general peer review.

The reason it wasn't subjected to that customary process was that it never would have passed. One peer scientist is John Christy of the University of Alabama, who has developed the satellite temperature history, which shows very little warming in its 23 years of existence. Commenting on the 11°F forecast a hearing chaired by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Christy said that was the one forecast made by the U.N. "that was not going to happen."

It's also worth noting that the U.N. made 244 other temperature forecasts, all cooler than 11°F. But Watson pointed to the hottest one and said that it "adds impetus for governments to find ways to live up to their commitments [under the Kyoto Protocol] to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases." Then, in a remarkable insult to the American people, Watson said, "A country like China has done more, in my opinion, than a country like the United States to move forward in economic development while remaining environmentally sensitive."

Six months later, the Washington Post reported that China had fudged its emission figures. The U.S. Embassy reported Chinese emissions had dropped "little, if at all," which should have been obvious to anyone (e.g., Watson) who could see the opaque air of Shanghai.

And, just for good measure, Watson closed that city's IPCC proceedings at almost exactly the same time President Bush took the Oath of Office, knowing full well that if the meeting lapsed over into the new administration the new President would rescind approval of the report.

In spring 2001, early in the Bush Administration, National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice pronounced, "Kyoto Is Dead," concurrent with a presentation that Watson was making to the Pew Foundation Center on Global Climate Change. His 44 Power Point images are available online. No. 37 is entitled, "The Challenge of Mitigation" and lists as its first priority, "The near-term challenge is to achieve the Kyoto targets."

All of this is plain to see: Governments choose the head of the IPCC, and the current head is clearly at odds with his current government. It's elementary, Dr. Watson!