Update: George Monbiot has made it clear that he did not ask for the
deletions of comments referred to below, but that the Guardian
moderators made the deletions for legal reasons and without his
knowledge. But he still fails to take the opportunity to discuss
the evidence that Williams and Niggurath produce.
George Monbiot is in trouble. He has already had to make
an apology for his mistakes in an attack on
Richard North.
He’s swinging like a weathervane on issues like vegetarianism and feed-in tariffs.
He has a strangely thin skin for somebody who viciously attacks
others, describing a mild riposte by Jonathan Porritt as `amazingly
unpleasant’.
And now he has now been caught out either deleting, or allowing The
Guardian to delete, inconvenient comments that contradict or
embarrass him. Here is what Julian Williams and Shub Niggurath say
at Bishop Hill:
Monbiot asked visitors to his
Guardian thread to come up with evidence of Dr Pachauri’s
unreliable bookkeeping. He must have thought this impossible.
The one account unable to be veiled from public
scrutinywas Pachauri’s TERI-Europe’s
and that had 85% of income missing from the books until prodded. I
provided Monbiot with what he asked for.
Monbiot declared Pachauri’s
personal accounts and financial practices were shown by KPMG as
being clean. In the light of the above however, Monbiot’s
unquestioning confidence in such conclusions were
puzzling.
About midday the inconvenient
evidence that I provided at the Guardian forum, along with
discussions of that evidence with aghast Monbiot fans were removed
from the thread. The thread was closed down.
Every single comment about the
accounts was removed.
…It is one thing to put forward
one’s own points of view and cite half-truths as evidence; it is
quite another to tamper with and remove facts from the public
record to support an argument that does not stand
up.
I am not altogether surprised at Monbiot’s collapsing
credibility. His `amazingly unpleasant’ attacks on my book included
such ludicrous distortions and mistakes that he’s long ago lost my
respect.