Waste No Tears on the IPCC’s Rajendra Pachauri

It’s a worthy saying, “Do not speak ill of the dead”, but I’ll make an exception for Dr Rajendra Pachauri. The chair of the IPCC for 13 years, to 2015, died at 79 last Thursday, January 13, of heart problems. He bugged out of the IPCC abruptly when a 29-year-old woman employed at his TERI think-tank called the cops about his sexual harassment for 15 months since almost the day she arrived there. He then used the labyrinths of the Indian court systems to stall the prosecutors for five years and ruin the life of his courageous young victim. A TERI panel affirmed her complaint, in which she  deposed:

I feel broken and scarred in body and mind due to Dr. Pachauri’s behaviour and actions. I get frequent panic attacks due to the constant harassment and being made to feel like an object of vulgar desire from this man, who is old enough to be my grandfather.

Apart from taking sexual advantage of his top-dog status at TERI and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Pachauri was a perjurer, an habitual liar and fantasist about the IPCC, a hypocrite, corrupt, and a non-scientist prepared to defame real scientists to cover his own and the IPCC’s gross bumbling. All round, he was an exemplar of the carpet-baggers aboard the catastrophic-warming bandwagon, currently on a roll involving $US1.5 trillion global spending a year. This essay documents the above.

For those who would claim Pachauri’s sex obsessions are nothing to do with his IPCC work, please note that while chairing the 37^th IPCC plenary in Batumi, Georgia, in 2013, attended by 229 politicians from 92 countries, Pachauri was surreptitiously firing off come-hither notes to the outraged and much put-upon young woman. Apparently, saving the planet was not top of mind for the IPCC chairman.

Pachauri was actually proud of his sleaze. He relaxed in 2009 by writing a semi-porn novel starring himself, thinly disguised, as “climate scientist Dr Sanjay Nath”. Titled Return to Almora, it features his hero when young in a pack queueing for sex with an impoverished village girl. Plus orgies, quasi-rapes and an unsettling description of a bride being buggered on her wedding night. A woman is taken to a motel by Sanjay but only after he has fondled her breasts – “which he just could not let go of” – while “inadvertently sounding the car horn at the same time.” But his conquests are impressed: “Afterwards she held him close. ‘Sandy, you are absolutely superb after meditation. Why don’t we make love every time immediately after you have meditated?’ ”

 More than the sleaze, it’s the narcissism that gets one down: “He decided to champion public causes and to expose and fight injustice and deceit” while hosing down the “personality cult” arising from his fame as a climate scientist.

Until his downfall, he was showered with honors, e.g. 23 honorary doctorates including one in 2008 from the gullible University of NSW.[i] Further south, Deakin University’s lauding of Pachauri merits a sick-bag:

Dr Pachauri’s gentle and unassuming demeanour is testament to his life’s work: ‘it seems only appropriate that one must assume such a persona when acting as something of a figurehead for sustainable futures.’

Did I call Pachauri a perjurer? Proven. Delhi High Court Judge K. Ramamoorthy found in a civil case in 1996 that Pachauri and his two TERI co-directors “have suppressed material facts and they have sworn to false affidavits.” The judge said (para 144) that management of the TERI think tank was unsafe in their hands.

You might think such a judgement would set back his career. No way. Within a year of this judicial non-accolade, the Asian bloc in the UN voted Pachauri into the IPCC as their vice-chair. In 2002, some of the UN’s most corrupt and undemocratic states voted him in as IPCC chair.

In other words, he was not fit to run a small Delhi eco-thinktank, but was deemed fit soon after to run a UN climate outfit mustering trillion-dollar spending on renewables and plotting a $US100 billion a year transfer of money from the West to Third World corruptocrats.

Fast forward to 2015 and Pachauri continued to perjure himself. Accused of harassment by the young woman, he swore that his email, phone and WhatsApp accounts had been hacked by cyber-criminals, who planted myriads of incriminating texts to the woman in order to discredit his planet-saving mission and preserve the profits of fossil-fuel villains. He demanded police investigation of the hacks. It was truly amazing that he’d never noticed all of 18 months of hacking, including forging his handwriting on love-notes. The hackers also used a bizarre modus operandum to discredit him – weird love notes to a young staffer. Imagine a hacker chewing his pencil and coming up with:

Oct 1, 2013 –   “Just to prove to you how much I love you, I shall go on a fast after the cricket match tomorrow. I will break the fast only when you tell me that you believe I love you with sincerity and unfathamable [sic] depth.”

Oct 1, 2013, 10:28 pm –   “All right! I’ve got the message. I wish you would see the difference between something tender and loving and something crass and vulgar. You obviously don’t! So I shall slink away and withdraw! Farewell my sweet [the complainant’s name]. But I insist on the fast just to hear you say that you believe I really love you!”

Oct 10 –   “I find it now very difficult to hug you. What haunts me are your words from the last time that I ‘grabbed’ your body. That would apply to someone who would want to molest you. I loved you in the soul, mind, heart…”

By December he was making threats:

You should reflect on the massive insult you heaped on me by indicating that I was so toxic that you would prefer not to sit next to me on the plane. If that be the case there is no room for any interaction between us.  To me that act of yours represented the ultimate in haughtiness, arrogance and insulting behaviour. If you had any human sensitivity you would have realised what you have done, and possibly apologised. You are welcome to remain a paid guest of TERI. I really would not burden you with any work in future.

In other words, submit or I’ll kill your career.

Another four women employees said he harassed them over a span of many years. One wrote,

When he saw my resignation letter, he threatened: ‘From the airport to the University you are headed to, I have friends at every step. Let’s see if you manage to leave the country.’

Because Indian magistrates and judges are not cretins, Pachauri eventually abandoned his “hacker” alibi.

Did I call Pachauri “liar” about the IPCC? Proven, and for lies that have influenced the world. It’s always been the meme that the IPCC represents “gold standard” trustworthy science. Here’s from the transcript of Pachauri’s testimony to a North Carolina legislative committee[ii]:

The IPCC … mobilises the best experts and scientists from all over the world and we carry out an assessment of climate change based on peer-reviewed literature, so everything that we look at and take into account in our assessments has to carry credibility of peer-reviewed publications, we don’t settle for anything less than that.

Pachauri was wrong, 5587 times wrong, because that’s the number of non-peer-reviewed or “grey-lit” citations in the IPCC’s 2007 assessment report—30 per cent of all citations, as journalist Donna Laframboise discovered. The grey-lit included press releases from Greenpeace and Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), not to mention a “first version of a draft”. The science team even used grey-lit in preference to unwelcome peer-reviewed findings. As George Filippo, a 2002–08 IPCC vice-chair of Group 1 (science), put it in a Climategate e-mail in 2000: 

I feel rather uncomfortable about using not only unpublished but also unreviewed material as the backbone of our conclusions (or any conclusions) … I feel that at this point there are very little rules [sic] and almost anything goes.

Pachauri used his lie about “peer-reviewed only” multiple times from multiple podiums. Every so-called “climate scientist” reader would have known Pachauri was mouthing garbage. Not one called him out: mustn’t sully the cause, guys! And it took one honest journalist, Donna Laframboise, contrasting with hordes of incompetents, to count that 5587 out of 18,531 references in the IPCC 2007 report were not peer reviewed.

Did I call Pachauri ‘hypocrite’? Proven. While telling the masses in 2010 to use public transport, Pachauri was getting chauffeur-driven in a smoky Morris Oxford derivative for 1 or 2km trips around Delhi, while his showpiece G-Wiz electric car stayed in his garage.

Abusive of real scientists? Proven. The IPCC 2007 report notoriously predicted the meltdown of Himalayan glaciers by 2035 (now a mere 15 years hence), which would deprive half a billion Asians of fresh water. An Indian glaciologist, Dr Vijar Raina, in 2009 picked up that the forecast was madness and that the supposed meltdown would take centuries (if ever). Pachauri blasted Raina as a “voodoo scientist” and practitioner of “magical science”.

If Pachauri had checked, he’d have found the 497-word passage by the IPCC had nine errors, including simple arithmetic (each error later corrected) and its provenance was gossip recycled by the activist Worldwide Fund for Nature.

Pachauri was forced to admit the errors in 2009 but never apologised to Dr Raina for the “voodoo” insult. To the contrary, he had used the supposed Himalaya crisis to solicit millions in climate aid for his think tank. In 2008 he appointed Syed Hasnain, who was most responsible for the howlers, to his TERI think tank as a “Professor and Distinguished Fellow”. In 2009 Pachauri creamed $US3.9m from the EU in glacier money for his think-tank. He almost got $US500,000 for TERI from the Carnegie Foundation for glacier-melt studies, but the Foundation smelt a rat and withheld the promised money.[iii]

Pachauri’s venom was too much for the respectable scientific community.[iv] Within a few months of the exposure he was compelled to invite the Inter Academy Council (IAC), a peak international science body, to report on IPCC procedural reforms to prevent more errors and loss of credibility. The IAC  admitted that “public confidence in climate science has waned” and said there were flaws in every major step of the IPCC procedures.[v]

The IAC audit report also said Pachauri should step down as chair. He refused and clung to his power, glory and harem-inclinations for a further five years.

Since Pachauri fled the IPCC, and because of the IAC audit, the IPCC has adopted a more cautious tone. In 2014 it even mentioned that 111 of 114 of the IPCC’s all-important forecasting models are biased to exaggerate warming.[vi] It has acknowledged there is no basis for attributing most extreme weather events to warming, and even noted that warming may reduce extreme weather. In fact, the zealots of “climate emergency” and “sixth extinction” are now accusing the IPCC of soft-pedalling their true message of doom.

Thirteen years was a long time for that vicious lying sleazebag Pachauri to be in charge of climate science. As another saying goes, the fish stinks from the head.

Tony Thomas’s hilarious history, The West: An insider’s tale – A romping reporter in Perth’s innocent ’60s is available from Boffins Books, Perth, the Royal WA Historical Society (Nedlands) and online here

[i]  Other honors included “The Green Crusader Award” (Mumbai); Aztec Eagle (Mexico); White Rose of Finland; and Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star (Japan).

[ii] Although it is oddly transcribed — “anthropogenic” becomes “natural progienic” and Pachauri is vexed about “vulnerable dentures”.

[iii] Pachauri (wearing his TERI hat, certainly not his Jane Austen bonnet) added helpfully re the melt work: “It is universally acknowledged that glaciers are melting because of climate change.”

[iv] Even without the IPCC errors, the melting Himalayas story is more farce than science. There are long-term data for at most about thirty of the 10,000 Himalayan glaciers; swathes of the region, apart from being uncomfortable, are off-limits for military reasons; and in the whole of the Himalayas, there was by 2010 only one automated temperature-recording station.

[v] The precise words: “significant shortcomings in each major step of IPCC’s assessment process.”

[vi] IPCC AR5:  “… an analysis of the full suite of CMIP5 historical simulations [computer models]   reveals that 111 out of 114 realisations show a [temperature] trend over 1998–2012 that is higher than the entire HadCRUT4 trend [actual temperatures] ensemble. This difference between simulated and observed trends could be caused by some combination of (a) internal climate variability, (b) missing or incorrect radiative forcing, and (c) model response error.” [chapter 9, text box 9.2, page 769]