Mark Steyn on the death of UN IPCC’s Rajendra Pachauri – ‘The Warmographic Novelist who Got #CO-Tooed’

There is, I think, a short scholarly monograph (peer-reviewed, naturally) to be written on the connection between global warming and sex. A decade or so back, you’ll recall, shortly after the leaked Climategate emails from East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit hit the Internet, there appeared in the European press the news that Danish prostitutes had sportingly offered their services for free to the warm-mongers assembling in Copenhagen for the big climate beano. I resisted comment – in part because all the jokes seemed too obvious: when you’re in a Danish bondage dungeon you have to pay extra if you want a second girl to come in and “peer-review” your submission, etc.

Alas, when Andrew Revkin, the Senior Climate Alarmist of The New York Times, made one brief, bland passing mention of the free-sex offer, Professor Michael Schlesinger of the University of Illinois fired off an email angrily denouncing his “gutter reportage” and threatening this most co-operative of eco-stooges with “the Big Cutoff” from “those of us who believe we can no longer trust you”. I assume the “Big Cutoff” alludes to access and not anything likely to spoil one’s evening at an environmentally aware whorehouse. Incidentally, in his intemperate missive, Professor Schlesinger used the phrase “climate prostitutes,” and it took me a while to figure out that was a reference to the Copenhagen hookers rather than the scientists.

Still, given the recent publicity about the Settled Science Syndicate’s bullying of dissenters, this hardly seemed the time to threaten a chap with excommunication not for questioning the “science” but for making a joke. Actually, not even a joke, but merely a lighthearted acknowledgement. “There are no jokes in Islam,” declared the Ayatollah Khomeini. And that goes double for climate science, says Professor Schlesinger.

So we should be grateful for the gift of one of the great comic figures of the age, Rajendra K Pachauri. Dr Pachauri, longtime head honcho of both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the highly lucrative TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute), died earlier this month at the age of 79 during heart surgery. He was a much garlanded man: Emperor Akihito gave him the Order of the Rising Sun; the French Government the Legion of Honor; the President of Finland the Order of the White Rose; and the panjandrums at Foreign Policy ranked him as Number Five in their list of “Top 100 Global Thinkers”.

Still, we should note, for those supplicants before authority who insist that you can’t pronounce on global warming unless you’re a bona fide climatologist, that Dr Pachauri was, in fact, a graduate of the Indian Railways Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. That’s to say, he was not a climatologist but a railroad engineer. So, if he ever availed himself of a free half-hour with a Danish hooker during that Copenhagen conference, I’m sure, like the Bombay to Cochin express, he pulled out on time.

In other words, he was a near parodically perfect choice to preside over the multi-trillion-dollar shakedown of the global economy that is “climate change”. For one thing, Dr Pachauri had one of the largest carbon footprints in human history, bigger even than Al Gore’s. He was in favor of “hefty aviation taxes” to “deter people from flying,” but, fortunately for him, once you’re part of the transnational jet-set nothing can deter you. He flew 443,243 miles on “IPCC business” in the year-and-a-half run-up to Copenhagen. I’m not sure whether that definition of “IPCC business” included his two weekend round trips from New York back to Delhi, once for a cricket match, once for a mere practice session for a cricket match.

Did anyone of the “experts” who want you to ride a bus and live under a government “carbon allowance” that permits you and Auntie Mabel one flight to Florida every three years query whether Dr Pachauri’s presence at that cricket practice was so vital as to justify a 15,000-mile round-trip? That sound you hear is cricketers chirping.

But the burdens of carbon reduction have to fall on thee not he because, in addition to all that “IPCC business”, Dr Pachauri was also busy researching his novel Return to Almora. As I put it in the bestselling book Climate Change: The Facts:

In the interests of saving the planet, IPCC honcho Rajendra Pachauri demands the introduction of punitive aviation taxes and hotel electricity allowances to deter the masses from travelling, while he flies 300,000 miles a year on official ‘business’ and research for his recent warmographic novel in which a climate activist travels the world bedding big-breasted women who are amazed by his sustainable growth. (Seriously: ‘He removed his clothes and began to feel Sajni’s body, caressing her voluptuous breasts.’ But don’t worry; every sex scene is peer-reviewed.)

The above was a seriously lawyered passage – because Dr Pachauri was as litigious as a certain Michael E Mann. But, in fact, the bit about his warmographic novel is all true. Here’s what I said at the time:

Rajendra Pachauri, the cricket-loving climate-profiteering Nobel Peace Prize-winner with a carbon footprint almost as big as Al Gore’s, heads up the IPCC, the global climate-change racket whose “settled science” is getting less settled by the minute. It seems an odd moment for Dr. Pachauri to branch out into bodice-heaving fiction:

‘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 book, which makes reference to the Kama Sutra, starts promisingly enough as it tells the story of a climate expert with a lament for the denuded mountain slopes of Nainital, in northern India, where deforestation by the timber mafia and politicians has “endangered the fragile ecosystem”.

‘But talk of “denuding” is a clue of what is to come…

‘”Sanjay saw a shapely dark-skinned girl lying on Vinay’s bed. He was overcome by a lust that he had never known before…”‘

Alas, as with the IPCC reports, after all the lascivious anticipation the ol’ hockey stick fails to keep its end up:

Sadly for Sanjay, writes Dr Pachauri, “the excitement got the better of him, before he could even get started”.

Oh, dear. There are times when even a climate expert can’t “hide the decline”. I was hoping for a sequel set on one of those celebrity Antarctic expeditions to view the vanished ice that winds up getting stuck in thick, er, ice and leaving all the do-gooders far from home and eyeing their shipmates. It was surely not too fanciful for Dr Pachauri to imagine Sanjay’s appeal to a lonely icebound Guardian reporter: Is that an ice core in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?

Unfortunately, Dr Pachauri’s agreeable life of jet-set cricket practice and warmographic research all came crashing down exactly five years ago, when a bazillion female employees of TERI (The Energy & Resources Institute) accused him of sexual harassment. See the Times of India story:

Pachauri Gets Relief Till Thursday

– which sounds like one of those climate-conference happy-ending gags Professor Schlesinger gets huffy about. Instead, it turned out Dr Pachauri had not been merely writing warmographic novels, but trying out lines from the next book on every comely climate chick in the research department:

Here I am sitting and chairing an IPCC meeting and surreptitiously sending you messages. I hope that tells you of my feelings for you!

The science may be settled but his pants weren’t. Was that the IPCC meeting where they decided the Himalayan glaciers were about to crack open and rain down an almighty cascading torrent washing everything in sight out into the Bay of Bengal?

Sadly, the object of his affection did not share his feelings. But you can understand why a guy who’d spent the entire 21st century insisting cooling is evidence of warming might well conclude that, when it comes to the IPCC office party, no means yes.

With the sex accusations against the Big Climate supremo, the tree-ring came full circle. Five years earlier, at the dawn of Climategate, the position of Dr Pachauri was that the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia had been “hacked”. Opening the Carbonhagen shakindownen inaugural session, he had dismissed the “Climategate” revelations as a “theft.” Not so. They were a leak by a concerned insider—the sort of chap we usually hail as a “whistle-blower.” But the old railway engineer in Dr Pachauri had long since hit the buffers: The whistle-blower could blow the whistle as loud as he likes but, like a deaf Central Railways conductor waiting to pull out for Wadala Road from the Victoria Terminus, Dr Pachauri couldn’t hear him. Someone, he insisted had hacked in to the CRU and doctored all the emails.

Half-a-decade on, in his own travails, the hacking had grown more sophisticated:

The 33-page complaint had described various acts of harassment allegedly committed by Pachauri. These include unwanted physical advances as well as emails, text and WhatsApp messages…

In a statement e-mailed to this paper on Tuesday evening, Pachauri had vehemently denied the allegations, claiming that he was a victim of hacking. Further Pachauri claimed to have become aware of the “misuse” of his “computer resources” after receiving questions from ET.

“The said email has indicated misuse of my computer resources and communication devices, without my permission or consent,” he said. “From your email, I have come to know the factum that my computer resources including my email ids, mobile phone and WhatsApp messages have been hacked and that unknown cyber criminals have gone ahead and have unauthorisedly accessed my computer resources and communication devices and further committed various criminal activities.”

Amazing. From “hide the decline” to “hide the declining of your unwanted advances”.

Unfortunately, as part of his bail conditions, the High Court forbade Dr Pachauri from leaving the country. So, instantly, the carbon footprint of his 300,000 frequent-flyer miles per annum was reduced to near-zero. Never has a climate alarmist set so sterling an example. The investigating committee at TERI found the overly active activist guilty of sexual harassment, stalking and criminal intimidation – and his wandering hockey stick was put out to grass permanently. In his resignation letter as head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s Numero Uno warm-monger gave the game away:

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.

Actually, it’s supposed to be science, and such authority as the IPCC has derives from the imprimatur of science. But the guy who’d run it for the past thirteen years said it’s his religion, and he was right: it’s the established church of globalism. Nice to have the point conceded.

This all happened three years before the #MeToo movement got going. Otherwise, it would have got a lot more attention, and Dr Pachauri would have been #MeToo’s #CO-Too branch. Instead, his old pals shrugged him off with nary a glance. Within days, Michael Mann was back to Tweeting that Obama was right to veto the Keystone Pipeline. When it comes to laying pipe around the planet, leave that to Rajendra Pachauri.

By the way, did you know that the launch party for Dr Pachauri’s sustainable-growth romp was paid for by BP? Hold that thought.

Rajendra Pachauri was one of those murky globalist bureaucrats who seem to run everything but whose existence I was only dimly aware of until Michael E Mann’s lawsuit forced me to take a lot more interest in these fellows. The fact that Mann’s boss at the IPCC was found to have sexually harassed women may be no more or less relevant than the fact that Mann’s boss at Penn State – Graham Spanier, the guy who hired him – was indicted for obstruction of justice, failure to report child abuse, and child endangerment.

But guilt by association is the entire modus operandi of Mann’s Big Climate enforcers. They clobbered poor old Lennart Bengtsson, one of the most respected men in his field, simply for having the temerity to associate with Nigel Lawson. They took the tire-iron to Willie Soon for accepting money from fossil-fuel corporations.

You mean, like Dr Pachauri took money from a fossil-fuel corp for the sex-book launch that emboldened him to try out his character’s best lines on real-life gals?

Or is that kind of fossil-fuel money okay?

I’m a general believer in freedom of association. But I did feel a touch of the Lady Bracknells coming on re Michael E Mann: To lose one boss in a sex crimes case may be regarded as misfortune; to lose the other boss in a sex crimes case looks like carelessness.

Mann’s original complaint against me was all IPCC this, Nobel Prize that, starting with the accusation that I and the other defendants had committed the hitherto unknown crime of “personal defamation of a Nobel prize recipient”. In fact, he’s not. But the old fraud persisted in identifying himself as a Nobel Prize winner because the IPCC under Dr Pachauri had won a Nobel Peace Prize and Mann was one of several thousand scientists who’ve “contributed” to the IPCC. I pointed out that Mann is not any kind of Nobel Prize winner – that he is to Nobel Prizes what NBC’s Brian Williams is to RPG targets – and, when journalists sought clarification, both the Nobel committee and the IPCC declared emphatically that Mann is not a Nobel Prize winner. His initial reaction to being called on a lie that he had peddled on an industrial scale in book jackets, websites, promotional advertising et al was to dig in deeper. He Tweeted and Facebooked a picture of himself with his Nobel Prize and sneered how come, if he wasn’t a Nobel Prize winner, he had one of these official Nobel Prize awards on display in his very office, huh?

Just to be clear, if you win a Nobel Peace Prize, you get invited to Oslo to meet the King of Norway and receive a Nobel Medal.

If you win a fake Michael E Mann Nobel Prize, you wind up like Mann with a piece of paper run off at the IPCC branch of Kinko’s signed by Rajendra Pachauri.

Michael Mann’s (since withdrawn) original complaint argued that it’s totally unacceptable to compare a Nobel Prize winner with a sex fiend. But in reality he has the only “Nobel Prize” ever to be awarded by a sex fiend. What are the odds of that?

Thank you, Dr Pachauri.

~Mark will see you on the telly tonight with Tucker.

We had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with our latest Clubland Q&A in which Mark took questions from Steyn Club members live around the planet on a range of topics from the state of the Democrat primary to fleeing Swedes and sodden Aussies. You can listen to the full show here. Kathy Shaidle’s Saturday movie date celebrated the first foreign-language film to be nominated for an Oscar, and Mark’s Sunday song selection bid bye bye, Bloomberg. Our marquee presentation was the latest audio adventure in Tales for Our Time: the John Buchan classic The Power-House. You can hear Mark introduce and read Part One here and Part Two here. If you were too busy hailing Joe Biden as the Comeback Coot this weekend, we hope you’ll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.

Part Three of The Power-House airs tonight at SteynOnline just before Tucker. Tales for Our Time is a special bonus feature of The Mark Steyn Club. For more on the Steyn Club, see here.