U.N. climate panel chief accused of sexual harassment: police

"Rajendra K. Pachaur" said
I did not have sexual relations with that data...err...woman

Some might even suggest Dr Pachauri�s first novel is frankly smutty.

Return to Almora, published in Dr Pachauri�s native India earlier this month, tells the story of Sanjay Nath, an academic in his 60s reminiscing on his "spiritual journey" through India, Peru and the US.

On the way he encounters, among others, Shirley MacLaine, the actress, who appears as a character in the book. While relations between Sanjay and MacLaine remain platonic, he enjoys sex � a lot of sex � with a lot of women.

In breathless prose that risks making Dr Pachauri, who will be 70 this year, a laughing stock among the serious, high-minded scientists and world leaders with whom he mixes, he details sexual encounter after sexual encounter.

Pachauri joined the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a lead author for its second assessment report, published in 1995. By the time of the third assessment, he was serving as one of the five vice-chairs. After that, in 2002, he decided to stand for the top job. The UN gave him not one term but two! He is now in the second year of his second 6-year term. Love him or hate him, we need to acknowledge that from a humble production engineer in a Locomotive Works to the Chair of the IPCC, this mercurial rise is a strong statement of Pachauri's personality itself.

The UN by appointing him made a loud statement - formal qualifications in climatology is unnecessary in carrying out �climate science research� in IPCC. In one-step, it not only marginalized but also denigrated the same climatologist�s fraternity who IPCC is supposed to represent as their highest research body globally. In the NGO field the same thing parallels. Look at the profile of climate change staff they recruit - graduates and post-graduates in English Literature, Fine Arts, Theology, Domestic Science, Statistics, Dance, Economics, History, Software, Commerce anything but Natural Science and particularly Physics, the foundation of climatology!



In March this year, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for an independent review of the inner workings of the IPCC in light of a number of recent scandals including Climategate emails, errors in the reports of the IPCC and allegations of conflict of interests from those writing these reports. The enquiry found that many of the apocalyptic claims made by the IPCC and parroted by NGOs and environmental organizations were not backed up by hard evidence. Until then Pachauri defended the IPCC and the science of climate change by stating that the nature of the IPCC process was a valid reason to accept the science. Now that the enquiry confirmed the IPCC, process was in fact deeply flawed and accordingly if we accept Pachauri�s logic; we can conclude the science behind global warming has been proved extremely flawed as well.





Pachauri rebuffed questions of the reliability of the data supporting the IPCC�s claim that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear in the coming decades, by terming these allegations as �Voodoo Science�.

Now Voodoo Science has come back to haunt the whole science behind the IPCC. However, Pachauri�s recent interview with Times of India gave two more explosive admissions whose implications are strongly damaging to the long-term credibility of NGOs:


a. IPCC is a Political Body:

�Let's face it, we are an intergovernmental body and our strength and acceptability of what we produce is largely because we are owned by governments. If that was not the case, then we would be like any other scientific body that maybe producing first-rate reports but don't see the light of the day because they don't matter in policy-making.

Now clearly, if it's an inter-governmental body and we want governments' ownership of what we produce, obviously they will give us guidance of what direction to follow, what are the questions they want answered.�

After decades of projecting the IPCC as the scientific body, this pretense is given up when its science fell apart. Here is the clearest of clearest admission that the IPCC reports were international government driven.



Rajendra Pachauri to the run-up of Copenhagen declared

"Today we have reached the point where consumption and people's desire to consume has grown out of proportion. The reality is that our lifestyles are unsustainable."

His solutions were more interesting. He wanted a curb on private car usage, hotel guests to have their electricity monitored; hefty aviation taxes introduced to deter people from flying; and iced water in restaurants curtailed among others.

The media however exposed him of pursuing a life wearing $1000 imported Armani suits, living in an estimated �5 million mansion in Golf Links, one of most prestigious residential location New Delhi, with neighbours including corporate magnate like Lakshmi Mittal, Britain�s richest man with an estimated �10.8billion fortune. Every home in this gated community has its own security guard and it enjoys round-the-clock police patrols to protect its wealthy residents. As for TERI, it maintains a 5-Star water guzzling golf course at its RETREAT � Resource-Efficient TERI Retreat for Environmental Awareness and Training � that sits among the farmhouses owned by Delhi's elite!

When cornered with all these charges, Pachauri could only snarl back,

�I am not a monk I don�t live in a monastery.�