Rajendra K. Pachauri, longtime chairman of the UN’s controversial Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), resigned on Tuesday, February 24, amid sexual assault and stalking charges. Indian television and print media reported on February 25 that Pachauri had checked into a hospital in Delhi. At least one Indian news analyst speculated that this may be a “strategic move” on the part of Pachauri’s legal team to use the claim of health problems to stave off their client’s likely arrest. Meanwhile, news reports out of India on February 26 state that an Indian court has granted him bail, but the court also bars him from leaving India or entering his office while police investigate the accusations.
The immediate impetus for the IPCC chairman’s resignation appears to be a story that surfaced on the front page of India’s Economic Times on February 18, reporting, “A 29-year-old female employee of The Energy and Reseources Institute (TERI) has lodged a police complaint against director-general Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, 75, alleging harassment.”
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The complainant, who works as a research analyst at the New Delhi-based TERI think tank run by Pachauri alleges that her boss repeatedly subjected her to unwanted physical advances, as well as inappropriate e-mails, text messages, and handwritten notes. Pachauri has denied the allegations, claiming that his computer and cellphone have been hacked and that the alleged messages must have been sent by the hacker.
On February 21, the IPCC Secretariat issued a press release announcing Pauchari “has informed the IPCC that he will be unable to chair the plenary session of the IPCC in Nairobi [Kenya] next week because of issues demanding his attention in India.” On February 21, India’s Mail Today newspaper ran a front-page story with the contents of some of Pachauri’s alleged texts, entitled “Messy Messages.” On February 22, more Indian newspapers, The Hindu and the Telegraph, carried front-page stories announcing that a second female TERI staffer had come forward with similar charges. According to the report in the Telegraph, the climate chief “preyed serially on women employees for at least a decade at his New Delhi-based non-profit energy organization, senior lawyers claimed today, citing a police complaint and testimony filed by two women.”
At a press conference, a lawyer for Pachauri’s first accuser read a letter from the new accuser, who charged that Pachauri is: “A sexual harasser ten years back and a sexual harasser now. He did it to me ten years back and he has done it to her now. I and many other female colleagues who have worked at the same work place as the woman have at some point in their life faced sexual harassment at the hands of this man.”
Pauchauri’s Fifty Shades of Grey
Interestingly, none of the many news stories checked by The New American mentioned Dr. Pachauri’s authorship of the 2010 “erotic novel” Return to Almora, which has been described by various reviewers as “racy,” “smutty,” and “steamy.”
In a 2010 review of Pachauri’s novel, Robert Mendick and Amrit Dhillon of the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper, wrote:
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.
The Pachauri novel, which reportedly references the Kama Sutra, the ancient, illustrated Sanskrit sex manual, revolves around the Olympian sexploits of Sanjay the climate expert, as he labors to save the planet. Telegraph writers Mendick and Dhillon excerpt sizzling passages from the book. This was not a work Pachauri wrote under a pseudonym, or something he has disavowed connection with (though both he and his attorneys, no doubt, are now wishing he had done so). No, it appears that Pachauri — or “Patchy,” as he is known among friends — was quite proud of his “literary” foray, as judged from this promotional photo gallery in the India Times at the time of his highly publicized book launch for Return to Almora.
The fact of the author’s fixation on serial recreational fornication in Return to Almora, does not prove, of course, that the serious criminal charges leveled against him are true. It does, however, lead a reasonable mind to consider the likelihood that this fixation in fiction would lead to a similar fixation in reality that would play out in the boss-employee relationship in the ways alleged by Pachauri’s accusers. In other words, Return to Almora tends to lend credibility to the women’s charges. It would also tend to further discredit the already discredited IPCC, which has stumbled from one scandal to another (as we have reported here, here, and here).
And too much has been invested — by the UN, by governments, by academic institutions, and by their media accomplices — in building up the IPCC’s supposed scientific prowess and the believability of its apocalyptic pronouncements, which the UN and national governments use to demand trillions of dollars and vast new powers.
The IPCC’s media promoters are afraid that many more erstwhile global-warming believers may jump ship at the very time that the warming alarmnists are trying mightily to win popular support for the UN’s upcoming climate summit in Paris, which they hope will birth a new planetary climate regime to control all human activity. They are afraid that many more scientists (and common taxpayers) will adopt the position of Professor Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Previously known as the “high priestess of global warming,” Dr. Curry has diagnosed the IPCC as suffering from “fatal permanent paradigm paralysis” and suggested that it should be “put down,” as one would a rabid dog. “The diagnosis of paradigm paralysis seems fatal in the case of the IPCC,” she said in 2013 on her popular blog, advising further, “We need to put down the IPCC as soon as possible.”
Pachauri: Being an Earth Savior “Is My Religion”
In his resignation letter of February 24 to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Pachauri states: “For me the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma.”
This, of course, is an admission of culpability to the charge that many critics have leveled at Pachauri, the IPCC and the entire global-warming choir for years, i.e., that they have usurped the mantle of science to cloak what is really a mission to impose their globalist, statist religion on all humanity: the Church of Global Warming, the Dogma of Sustainability.
And, since “Patchy” the green “love guru” is also the high priest of this church, his fellow religious believers in the media, naturally, feel a strong obligation to protect their institution from the effects of his fall from grace. There is a sharp contrast between the Big Media’s recent immolation of climate “heretic” Dr. Willie Soon and the current deference, dilatory reporting, and protective shielding they have provided for Pachauri and the IPCC.
However, as more details (and possibly more women accusers) emerge, the once-sainted image of Earth savior Pachauri is likely to be more severely scrutinized. That would be a very healthy thing — especially before the Paris summit, which he has been so instrumental in forming. Patchy’s sexual proclivities (and alleged crimes) are not the only “irregularities” that call into question his moral fitness, and the ethical standing of the whole “climate industry.”
We have reported here in The New American, as far back as 2010 on Pachauri’s inherent conflicts of interest and lucrative pecuniary benefits from his advisory positions on the Chicago Climate Exchange, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Credit Suisse, as well as his chairmanship of both the Indochina Sustainable Infrastructure Fund and the advisory board of the Asian Development Bank. Like former Vice President Al Gore (with whom he shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize), Patchy has profited nicely from his IPCC Church of Global Warming post. While we do not find fault with private profit per se (indeed, it is laudable when ethically earned), it is worse than unseemly for Al, Patchy, and their “green” colleagues to exploit their positions as public “prophets” for their own private profit, especially when so much of their “earnings” are extracted politically from unsuspecting consumers and taxpayers.
During the past 13 years of Pachauri’s reign at the IPCC, while the “green” mainstream media have polished his halo, Patchy’s critics have uncovered and published a massive cache of documentary evidence that should have long ago brought about his forced resignation and prosecution, and should as well have caused saner minds to have called for implementing Professor Curry’s proposal to mercifully “put down” the IPCC, before it could do any more damage.
Some of the most damning evidence has been uncovered and reported by journalist/author/blogger Donna Laframboise, whose 2013 book Into the Dustbin: Rajendra Pachauri, the Climate Report & the Nobel Peace Prize and plucky website, NoFrakkingConsensus.com, have proven to be genuinely prophetic. Also among the vindicated Patchy/IPCC critics are Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com and Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com.
The work of these and other IPCC/Pachauri/global-warming critics may now receive the higher level of public exposure it deserves — even if Pachauri’s co-religionists in the press climate choir continue to ignore it.
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