The Dirty Old Man of Climate Science

Charles Dickens in Bleak House excoriated the English legal system for its expensive delays. His novel tracks the generations-long inheritance dispute of Jarndyce & Jarndyce. It ends only when the entire estate is consumed by the lawyers’ fees. Somewhat like Dickens, I’ve been following an obscure sexual harassment case in New Delhi for the past ten years, a case which finalised a fortnight ago. It’s one less thing on my mind, although a decade is just a sliver compared with Jarndyce & Jarndyce.

This New Delhi saga was so protracted that the harasser died three years ago, but his family kept the appeal going.  His victim was a junior researcher in her late 20s when her boss, in his mid-70s, started grabbing and importuning her, finally sabotaging her job over her refusals. She fought on in courts for vindication of honour and to ensure that her harasser, alive or dead, should be held accountable.

Before I name him, I’ll segue to some history of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This IPCC, a UN subsidiary, is very influential. Its ramblings about global warming in 2100 inspired Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to embark on what the CBA estimates to be a $3 trillion net-zero-emissions dash by 2050. Counting the zeroes (with difficulty), it amounts to $120,000 per head or nearly a half million per household. Mr Albanese’s program (which was backed by purported conservative PM Morrison) is necessarily to

♦ Demolish our once-cheap and reliable coal and gas-fired electricity grid

♦ Cover the landscape, so beloved by Australian outback movies, with windmills and solar arrays along with at least 10,000km of high-voltage power lines.[1]

♦ Force every Australian out of petrol and diesel cars and trucks and into electric models

♦ End all discretionary air travel including overseas holidays and tourism (except by private jet) and

♦ Wreck the Australian meat, livestock and cereal industries in favour of emissions-friendly vege dishes drizzled with grilled grasshoppers.

One might assume this IPCC must be a body of impeccable standing and total respect for scientific findings, including UAH satellites recording no global warming for the past nine years. For 13 sparkling years, from 2002 to 2015, the IPCC was championed by its chair, Dr Rajendra Pachauri. He was of such repute and all-round climatoidal magnificence that 20 universities showered him with honours — including the University of NSW, which bestowed in 2008 its Honorary Doctorate in Science. The IPCC has been at work for 35 years so Dr Pachauri’s 13-year term equates to 37 per cent  of its existence.

Other Australian universities competed to fawn on him, overlooking that his earned doctorate was from a combined Industrial Engineering/Economics course (North Carolina State University, currently ranked 72^nd in the USA) rather than any high-falutin’ climate expertise. Deakin University in Victoria, wowed by what it called “one of the world’s leading experts on climate change” and its “great coup” in securing his patronage, even bestowed on him a Nobel Prize. As one Deakin luminary put it:

Dr Pachauri’s gentle and unnassuming (sic) 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.[2]

The IPCC chair’s other honours included “The Green Crusader Award” (Mumbai); Aztec Eagle (Mexico); White Rose of Finland; and Order of the Rising Sun – Gold and Silver Star (Japan).

NOW it’s time for the big reveal: who was that grabber and tormenter of young women condemned by Indian courts this month? You guessed it, the late Dr Pachauri.

The climate crowd asserts that Pachauri’s priapic ways had nothing to do with his IPCC work. But they overlook Pachauri’s chairing of the 37^th IPCC plenary in Batumi, Georgia, in 2013, for example. It was attended by 229 politicians from 92 countries, including a team from Australia, who imagined Dr Pachauri was serious about the planetary peril of global warming.[3] But instead of fretting about greenhouse gas control,[4] the IPCC’s chairman was firing off come-hither notes under his desk to the outraged young woman assistant from his think-tank TERI. One message read, “Here I am sitting and chairing an IPCC meeting and surreptitiously sending you messages. I hope that tells you of my feelings for you.” Turning a blind eye, his PR flacks issued this doozy of a release saying Dr Pachauri

opened the session on Monday morning noting the need to view climate change in the larger context, including its impacts on future generations and the planet, and emphasizing the IPCC’s role in mobilizing the world’s best scientific talent and bringing climate change to the public’s attention. He stressed that the IPCC’s work is more relevant, robust and reliable than ever to policy makers.(My emphases above and throughout).

The conference, despite the boss’s libidinous distraction, went on to ratify two greenhouse gas inventory protocols, and start “initial discussions on mapping the future of the IPCC”. 

Dr Pachauri combined 13 years of chairing the IPCC with writing fiction, described as somewhere between smutty romance (Times of India) and soft porn, as in his signature work Return To Almora. His alter ego was called Sanjay, a world-leading climate scientist. The sex scenes led to mockery by bloggers. When Sanjay found that “the excitement got the better of him” before he could join a queue copulating with the village tart, bloggers suggested he needed to “hide the decline”. Pachauri rejected the soft-porn label, and I’d agree that half a dozen sex scenes, such as a bride being forcibly buggered by her husband on their wedding night, are incidental to the eco-friendly but soporific plot of 402 pages.[5] It’s the narcissism that got me down: “He decided to champion public causes and to expose and fight injustice and deceit”. Author and protagonist are way too close: The barely fictional Sanjay even checks in to a “smart suite” at Pachauri’s own address at India Habitat Centre, tries to hose down the “personality cult” from his fame as a seer of temperatures, and agonises about the melting Himalayan glaciers.

That Himalayas meme was a nonsense in the 2007 IPCC report.[6] Far from apologising, Pachauri had used the fake Himalaya news to corruptly solicit millions in climate aid for his TERI think tank. In 2008 he appointed Syed Hasnain, who was most responsible for the Himalaya howlers, to TERI as a “Professor and Distinguished Fellow”. In 2009 Pachauri creamed $US3.9 million from the EU in glacier-research money for TERI. He almost got $US500,000 from the Carnegie Foundation for glacier-melt studies, but the Foundation smelt a rat and withheld the promised money.[7]

The fake Himalaya scare earned the IPCC a scathing audit report by the InterAcademy Council (top-tier national science academies). In vain it urged Pachauri to hand his central post on the world climate stage to someone else. Pachauri stuck around for a further five years, until February 2015, when he was clobbered by the sex scandal.[8]

When the scandal became public, I emailed the UNSW media team in mid-2015: “Is the UNSW taking any steps now to review or revoke Dr Pachauri’s honorary doctorate?” The university’s Denise Knight emailed back, reasonably enough: “As the matter is before the courts it is inappropriate for us to reach conclusions or take action at this stage.” I prophesised at the time, “It is good that UNSW is tracking the Delhi court case and will at least contemplate the first-ever revocation of an honorary UNSW doctorate in the event that Pachauri is formally convicted as a sleazebag.” This week, in light of the Delhi ruling, I therefore emailed again: “Is UNSW happy for the late Dr Pachauri to remain a DSc (honorary) of UNSW, despite his conviction for despicable treatment of a female employee, or will UNSW examine whether to revoke that honour?”

After all, I thought, UNSW’s ethical guidelines include

Staff and affiliates are required to:

♦ treat students, staff and affiliates with respect

♦ ensure they do not engage in unlawful discrimination, harassment and sexual harassment

♦ not allow personal relationships to affect professional relationships

♦ ensure they do not engage in workplace bullying.

Dr Pachauri Hon D.Sc (UNSW) practised the opposite. UNSW has replied to my query, saying,

UNSW Sydney is reviewing the honorary doctorate conferred on the late Dr Rajendra Pachauri.

What an excellent response! After this over-long preamble it’s time to deal with the Indian court’s dismissal of the Pachauri family appeal.  

“Maya” (not her real name[9]), then 29 while the married Pachauri was 74, had the courage to initially report Pachauri to the three-person complaints committee of his TERI think-tank. The trio interviewed 30 witnesses for the woman, and 19 for Pachauri. Another four women employees came out of the closet saying 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.’

 The complaints committee on May 19, 2015, recommended — without result — disciplinary action against its own director-general, plus compensation for Maya for medical expenses over stress. [10] Pachauri then appealed to the Industrial Court, claiming her accusations were “frivolous and malicious.” He died on February 20, 2020, having kept the case stalled for five years. Four Pachauri relatives then continued the appeal saga but the court’s Ajay Goel, presiding, ruled for Maya last July 3.[11] She deposed[12]

I feel broken and scarred in body and mind due to Dr. Pachauri’s behavior 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.

Till [February 2015] I was extremely scared of reporting the behaviour of Dr. Pachauri, as he is the head of the organization for which I work and I did not know who I could turn to for help. I have tried to ignore and brush aside a lot of offensive behaviour from Dr. Pachauri as I was very scared of losing my reputation and employment if I complained to anyone. I request you to register my complaint against Dr. Pachauri and bring him to justice.

Maya then went to police because, after filing the internal complaint, she was given no protection, being expected to continue reporting to Pachauri on a daily basis. Pachauri told the coppers that the young woman was merely working off grudges over a poor performance assessment.[13] He further claimed he was being targeted by vested interests (What? The fossil- fuel lobby was drafting his love porn)?

He also claimed to be the victim of a conspiracy by cyber hackers out to destroy his reputation as the world’s climate chief. Some subordinate, he insisted, had his password and spent 14 months composing and sending love-lorn messages to Maya – without Pachauri ever noticing. As one Indian paper put it, maybe he would next blame space aliens.

In detail, Maya said that barely a week after joining TERI, he was pestering her with the first of hundreds of late-night texts and day-time grabbings. “Please you are not to grab me and or kiss me,” she begged.

Pachauri: Perhaps, you regard a physical relationship as a matter of expediency and convenience. Well I don’t, and certainly not with your body which I worship, as you should have found out by not. Even when I ‘grabbed your body’ I had my left hand over your right breast. Did I make even the slightest attempt to hold it in my hand or fondle you there?”

 Maya, October 1, 9.38pm: I never said you were so repulsive. I came all the way just to keep my word and do [what] I best do – talk genuinely. As a woman and a 21st century woman I deserve the right to say that you kindly should not try [to] hold me close or kiss me.

Pachauri, October 1, 10:12 pm: And 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 believe I love you with sincerity and unfathomable depth.

Pachauri, 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. But I insist on the fast just to hear you say that you believe I really love you.

Pachauri, November 14, 2013: Its 4.30 am now, and I should get a couple of hours of sleep. Around you for now, but not for long and still deeply in love.

Pachauri, February 25, 2014: I think the next time we are alone together, I would cut myself and write in my own blood a pledge that I would provide sincerity and exclusivity to an extent that even you would not be able to anticipate and believe. I really do not know how else to convince you than to write such a pledge in my own blood. I find every gesture, every smile, every touch of yours as a boon from heaven.

Her last straw was Pachauri’s demand in December 2014 for her sit next to him in business-class international – with obvious intentions. Six months earlier on a plane he had passed her this hand-written note:

I dreamt last night that I did the preliminaries of making love to you, but woke up at the critical moment.

The second time, when she insisted on an economy seat, he messaged:

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.

The New Delhi cops, which initially hit him with sex crimes worth seven years’ jail, began running dead on the case. One local court even instanced police abandoning an interview “in view of his advanced age” — which hadn’t stopped him running the IPCC.

Pachauri was a liar about his personal life, and even so in sworn court testimony — Delhi High Court Judge K. Ramamoorthy found in a grubby money case in 1996 (long pre-dating the Maya case) that Pachauri and his two TERI co-directors “have suppressed material facts and they have sworn to false affidavits.” Within a year of this judicial condemnation, the Asian group in the corrupt UN voted Pachauri into the IPCC as their vice-chair, and in 2002 the dictator-led majority of governments voted him in as IPCC chair.

 But did he continue lying from from his IPCC pulpit? Too right he did! Below, part of the transcript of Pachauri’s testimony to a North Carolina legislative committee:

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 5587 times wrong, because 5587 was the number of non-peer-reviewed or “grey-lit” citations in the IPCC’s 2007 assessment report — an astonishing 30 per cent of all 18,531 citations, as ethical Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise discovered after crowd-sourcing the huge research effort involved. The grey-lit included press releases from Greenpeace and WWF, not to mention a “first version of a draft”. The IPCC team even used grey-lit in preference to unwelcome peer-reviewed findings. Every so-called “climate scientist” involved with the IPCC knew Pachauri was mouthing garbage about his peer-review claim. Not one of those science carpet-baggers called him out: mustn’t sully the cause, guys! Next time you hear Tim Flannery, Anthony Albanese or the increasingly ridiculous Chris Bowen demanding that we “respect the science”, keep those cowardly boffins’ silence in mind.

What a dangerous farce this climate-apocalypse story is. At the risk of an ad hominem, the chap running the IPCC for most of this century, and honoured by our university big-wigs, was a Harvey Weinstein-style brute judicially condemned even years after his expiry. But congrats to UNSW for its review of the brute’s honorary doctorate.

Tony Thomas’s new book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. For a copy ($35 including postage), email tthomas061@gmail.com

[1] Actually wind turbines generate nothing during multi-day wind droughts across the Eastern States, as everyone knows but our politicians and the experts at Tim Flannery’s Climate Council.

[2] Deakin was fully aware of Pachauri’s agenda to use global warming as a tool to shift billions or trillions from the First World to Third World kleptocracies. It quoted him approvingly:

Dr Pachauri has said previously that the West needs to make major structural and policy changes in the way it goes about economic development – wealth needs to be shifted from the developed to the developing nations.

[3] Our top man there was Anthony Swirepik of DIICCSRTE or Department of Industry, Innovation, Climate Change, Science, Research and Tertiary Education

Lead authors there from down-under were Daniel Alongi of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, and Rob Sturgiss, who is described as “passionate about promoting the role of the IPCC in development of national greenhouse emissions inventory reporting frameworks”.

[4] “The two Methodology Reports under consideration in Batumi are the 2013 Supplement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories : Wetlands (Wetlands Supplement) and the 2013 Revised Supplementary Methods and Good Practice Guidance Arising from the Kyoto Protocol (KP Supplement).”

[5] A woman is being driven to a motel by Sanjay 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?’

[6] 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.

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

[8] The audit found “significant shortcomings in each [i.e. every] major step of IPCC’s assessment process.” And it admitted that “public confidence in climate science has waned”. The Australian Academy of Science made no public mention this IAC audit other than a couple of  anodyne lines in its annual report seven months later, notwithstanding that the Academy’s ex-president Kurt Lambeck one of the two monitors overseeing the audit report.

[9] Maya is not a sceptic concerning climate-change orthodoxy.

[10] The respondents also suggested that Pachauri organised his underlings to make intimidatory visits to the trio’s homes late at night.

[11] The judge found that Pachauri’s sex campaign was “not at all appreciated by complainant, who rightly sought legal shelter … He should have been setting example in the institution but to the contrary, he had rather violated the dignity of the woman by committing sexual harassment which cannot be ignored by the court and cannot be endorsed. So the arguments of appellant are not tenable…Appeal is dismissed being without any merits.”

[12] Owing to some complexity of the India’s Sexual Harassment Act 2013, I can’t quote directly from some sections of Judge Goel’s judgement. Hence I have linked some email passages to external (non-judgement) sources, particularly the splendid work of Donna Laframboise in Canada.

[13] Some links to my original Indian sources are now broken through effluxion of time.