Salute this man! Pachauri did what no climate sceptic is able to do. A Trojan Horse that destroyed the IPCC from the inside.

If Pachauri did not exist, we climate sceptics would have had to literally invent him. He is in fact every sceptic’s dream. How could we have asked for more when he embodies the UN Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in all its completeness? Interestingly, he also strongly epitomizes the typical climate activist and their organizations that they are attached. Did he mould both in his image or vice versa is however for history to judge. 

We sceptics have always dubbed the IPCC as a political body that have little to do with science. Pachuari steps in to give us a helping hand. Here he is,  heading the IPCC with basic qualifications of being a Railway Engineer, starting off his career with Diesel Locomotive Works in Varanasi before taking a “joint” (whatever that means, probably a sandwich course) PhD in industrial engineering and economics in the US. A few years after returning to India, he accepted the directorship at TERI, and also held visiting posts at a US University and the World Bank. 

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! 

What all this led was the perception that all you need to be a climate change “specialist” is strong communications skills to deliver apocalyptic messages. The skill to arouse guilt and scare is big business, highly valued by NGOs as this is what that their cash registers keeps ringing. This is also why a whole tribe of enviro-journalists mostly constitute the core of NGO and environmental organizations climate change “credentials”. They even go by fancy designations like “Climate Adviser” but none possesses the guts to publicly debate science with leading climate sceptic scientists. And we all know why by now! 

This outcome gave impetus to scientists to start pretending that they were politicians like the discredited Al Gore or NGOs like Greenpeace. Meanwhile NGOs and environmental activists in turn started pretending that they were internationally acclaimed scientists that gave them the right to make outlandish claims of apocalyptic disasters. One of the things about the IPCC is that it is mandated to lay down the facts. If mixed with subjective views, it became a distortion of science. But with Pachauri as their role model and Al Gore as their high priest, this became a standard practice for the entire climate movement.

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. Which governments control the finances of the IPCC? We know it is the US and EC and wherein developing countries like India had hardly any voice in the finalization of any of the IPCC reports published to date.

This means NGOs like Greenpeace India, WWF India, Christian Aid India, Action Aid and Oxfam India were actually camouflaging political agendas of foreign governments by packaging these as local concerns using funds from these foreign governments! This exposes them practically as stooges of foreign governments, which is a blow for the credibility of their larger advocacy programmes for some time to come! Never mind they append India to their names, as we know from history, so did the East India Company.

b. The claim that uncertainties could be quantified is a myth

“They have talked about quantifying uncertainties. To some extent, we are doing that, though not perfectly. But the issue is that in some cases, you really don't have a quantitative base by which you can attach a probability or a level of uncertainty that defines things in quantitative terms.”

Here we have Pachauri on record. All the apocalyptic scenarios were simply guesswork, as uncertainties of a chaotic system do not lend themselves for quantification. This means yours, mine and everyone else guesses are as good or as bad as those given in the IPCC Reports!!

And yet the WWF, Greenpeace, Christian Aid, Action Aid and Oxfam make their apocalyptic prophecies so definitive!!  By 2100, sea levels will rise 100 ft; temperatures will rise 10 deg. C blah, blah! Thomas Fuller in a recent blog in WUWT commented: 

“First, it should be obvious that the manipulation of the messages isn’t coming from scientists. It is too professional, too slick and ultimately too wrong. .... Second, and important, all of the messages have very serious flaws in the narratives that accompany the pictures they ship out.” 

Obviously, we know that NGOs and environmental organizations are behind all these exaggerations and distortions. NGOs are hardly directly accountable to members in the same way that governments are to voters or businesses are to shareholders, which give them a greater degree of freedom to deviate from the truth. This raises a series of related questions:

- What drove them to transform what was a theoretical possibility for climate scientists, into a near certainty for public consumption? Are they simply imbecile idiots who have no understanding what they utter or just trying to deliberately con the larger public as they are contracted to do by their funders (governments)?

- What core competence in scientific research do these NGOs have any way? With no  peer reviewed scientific paper on Climate Change that these NGOs have either individually or collectively produced, how did the David Suzuki Foundation, Environmental Defence, Greenpeace, WWF, Oxfam and Friends of the Earth were among the IPCC’s “expert reviewers?

Joseph Goebbels was able to demonstrate that even the most outrageous information, when properly and consistently communicated could affect public perception, policy and behaviour. Goebbels is alive and well today in the manipulation of facts as we see in these NGO communications. Fortunately as Thomas Fuller points out, it is these exaggerations that ultimately crippled the climate change movement. NGOs and environmental organizations simply killed the goose that laid golden eggs for them, by stretching facts so much that people just started disbelieving them anymore.

This is a cost, which NGOs and environmental organizations have to bear for a long long time. They willingly sacrificed their credibility for short gains by delivering apocalyptic messages that has no factual basis. History will perhaps record this period as one of darkest chapters of the NGO/environmental movement where facts didn’t matter, funding did and they were willing to stoop as low as they were asked to by their funders.   

Pachauri Institutionalised Hypocrisy of the Climate Change Movement  

 

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.”

Former vice-president of US, Al Gore, with whom Pachauri shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, was even in a higher league.  Gore and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. Complete with swimming pool. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn. and a fourth mansion was reportedly recently acquired) In the Washington, D.C., area, utility companies offer wind energy as an alternative to traditional energy.

However, according to public records, there is no evidence that Gore has signed up to use green energy in either of his large residences. He advocates everyone to cut their electricity, but from just one of his mansions, he chalks up a bill of $30,000, nearly 221,000 kilowatt-hours in 2006, more than 20 times the national average of 10,656 kilowatt-hours! His massive “carbon footprint” can be brought home by the fact that he travels only in fleets of limos and SUVs and in private jets. To top it all, Gore bought a custom-built, multi-million luxury yacht, built specifically for him.

Once adversaries Gore and Pachauri were jointly conferred the Nobel Prize for Peace despite their blatant eco-hypocritical lifestyles. When the leading icons of the movement do not walk their talk and are actually rewarded for it, it serves a role model for NGO and environmental organizations to emulate.

Those who work with them, like Pachauri and Gore, practice lip service to sustainable development as the very culture underpinning these organizations makes its staff adopt very unsustainable living practices. Part of this problem lays in the pay structures of the likes of WWF, Greenpeace,  ActionAid, Christian Aid etc. It is well known these are structured to be almost competitive to the corporate sector.  A Country Head’s salary could be the range of Rs 1 million upwards per month.

It would be logical to ask, why these individuals need so much money when they supposed to be practioneer of simple living as they publicly project. They may not be wealthy relative to the class of a Pachauri or a Gore but they live in relatively affluent areas, sent their children to expensive private schools and universities abroad.

They frequent eating-houses and hotels patronised by those belonging to the Pachauri class. Any travel agent will confirm that these NGOs and environmental organizations give them more business in flight bookings than corporate establishments. Not only their offices but also their houses are usually fully air-conditioned. In addition, look at the fleet of SUVs and other fuel guzzling vehicles they possess. That they do not even believe in cutting down their own ”carbon footprint” is illustrated by the WWF exclusive luxury tour as advertised: 

“Join us on a remarkable 25-day journey by luxury private jet," invites the WWF in a brochure for its voyage to "some of the most astonishing places on the planet to see top wildlife, including gorillas, orang-utans, rhinos, lemurs and toucans.

For a price tag that starts at $64,950 per person, travellers will meet at the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando, Fla. on April 6, 2009 and then fly to "remote corners" of the world on a "specially outfitted jet that carries just 88 passengers in business-class comfort." "World class experts - including WWF's director of species conservation - will provide lectures en route, and a professional staff will be devoted to making your global adventure seamless and memorable. Travellers will visit the Amazon Rain Forest in Brazil, Easter Island, Samoa, Borneo, Laos, Nepal, Madagascar, Namibia, Uganda or Rwanda, and finish up at the luxury Dorchester Hotel in London.” 

If such a tour does not boost the carbon footprint of travellers, what does? None in the climate activist movement including Greenpeace condemned such a tour. If this is not the height of hypocrisy, we can be faulted to ask what is.

Hypocrisy by itself is not particularly objectionable as after all it is an individual’s life choice. Nevertheless, it undercuts the very message they are trying to peddle. It only becomes objectionable when these eco-hypocrites want the rest of the world through policy changes to reduce their standard of living while they can go on increasing as if on a privileged basis. So they preach that we the masses should not use compact fluorescent light bulbs, reduce our heating or cooling energy requirements, use the car pool instead of private cars and scooters, switch to more expensive “green” power, do not fly or even think of a foreign holiday etc.

Our declining standards of living make these “green” elites feel not too guilty while jet setting to exotic locales, and otherwise having a ball! This is nothing but sadism and accentuating the differences between the haves and the have-not’s. If you are financially supporting one of these NGOs guilty of this, please stop your support immediately and let them know what you think of them! If you mad enough, sue them!!

 
Save Pachauri, Windup the IPCC

 

  

Pachauri's smutty book, "Return to Almora" is laced with references to the out-sized sexual appetite of the protagonist Sanjay Nath, whose bedtime capers through university and later life are described in excruciating detail.

"Sometimes I'd be so overwhelmed trying to capture an incident of my life for the book that I would be moved to tears."

Pachauri told the Indian Express after publication of his 23rd book, his first foray into fiction. So by his own admission, "Return to Almora" is more a fictionalized autobiography in which the main character goes from extreme youth to his early sixties.

Here are extracts of a book review by Walter Russell Mead in WUWT: 

“Lucky for him, Sanjay never encounters any serious criticism in this book.  No one accuses him of scientific fraud, no one seriously disagrees with his ‘research’, no one takes him to task over the fee structures of his Meditation Huts (or whatever he calls his 400 plus franchised enlightenment outlets). 

It seems likely that if controversy ever came Sanjay’s way he would respond badly.... At the end, he would vanish from the scene, looking and sounding hurt, and go off to seek inner peace among the forgiving silence of the Himalayan hills."

Following the Inter-Academy Council (IAC) report into the IPCC's processes, the clamour for Pachauri's resignation from the Chair of the IPCC has begun and if they succeed; Pachauri would probably withdraw into the Himalayas and turn to NGO work as he wrote in his book. Ironic in some ways as a man who perversely influenced NGOs would choose to dissolve himself within its canvass.

However, what purpose would this serve? How can it even help the IPCC for Pachauri was only its public face and an effective one too as Daily Bayonet, a sceptic blog commented 

“How many other leaders of otherwise obscure UN bureaucratic bodies can you name? “

To his credit, Pachauri became a household name.  He gave to climatology a visibility that it never received in the past.

When warmists including those in the media like those of Geoffrey Lean and The Economist are calling for Pachauri’s scalp, then we should be wary.  The problem with the IPCC was its limited mandate to prove that anthropogenic global warming is the prime driver of global climate as a camouflage to control developing countries access to cheap energy to enable products and services of developed economies to become more competitive. 

 

What crime did Pachauri commit any way? The media has dug out certain allegations cast against Pachauri when he stood as candidate for the Chair of the IPCC for the first time. The Wall Street Journal pointed out that,

“As an academic, he staunchly defended his country’s right to burn coal.” 

Al Gore the first high priest of global warming in his Earth Day’s address in 2002 blasted Pachauri’s candidacy for the Chair of the IPCC:

“But, just as Enron needed auditors that wouldn't blow the whistle when they lied about future liabilities, Exxon needs a scientific panel that won't blow the whistle on the future damage that will be caused by Global Warming. Incidentally, this man President Bush has just given a global megaphone is also the principal opponent of President Bush's stated policy that developing countries should share in the reduction of greenhouse gases.

In fact, the man President Bush has just chosen as the leader of the world's most prestigious environmental body has even called for, in his words, "a worldwide movement which boycotts American goods as a source of global pollution."

So what do all these allegations paint Pachauri’s ideological orientation as? It first confirms that he is a dye-in-the wool climate sceptic. He continues to sit on the boards of coal and petroleum companies, considered as “dirty energy”. Secondly, he is diehard Patriotic Indian. Not only have his academic credentials included championing coal for our country’s energy needs, he continued to do so as Chair of the IPCC. Thirdly, he puts the blame for pollution directly on the west, putting the onus squarely on them for the cleanup of the planet. Fourthly, he championed the cause of the developing and least developed nations to have a greater voice in the whole climate debate. This is what the Guardian admitted: 

“As the first chair of the IPCC from a developing country he has not just succeeded in engaging Africa and the poorest countries in the climate debate, but has given them a voice. It is quite possible that it is exactly this loud, uncompromising voice from the south demanding justice and compensation from the polluters, that so offends the western press and its commentators.”

Did his ideological orientations in any way come to offer obstacles to the IPCC’s agenda? Anthony Watts who administers the popular climate sceptic blog WUWT comments:  

“Because the IPCC is very small and its primary mission is to produce a report once every five or six years, it is vulnerable to the type of leadership Pachauri apparently provides–detached, aloof, hands-off. That Pachauri had time to write a book during the firestorm of Climategate and COP-15 is evidence that, whatever his capabilities, his performance at the IPCC was not sufficiently engaged. His shabby treatment of IPCC scientists regarding the error on Himalayan glaciers is more of an exclamation point than anything else.”

Therefore, we need to ask once again. What crime did Pachauri commit any way? He just permitted free play to the natural instincts of global warmist to exaggerate, cherry pick, manipulate and fudge data to further their case through his detached and hands-off leadership.  He travelled all the time, wrote books and presumably gave wide expression to his libido in every port he visited. He gave ample representation to non-scientists from the climate activist movement in the panel of scientific reviewers. They repaid this favour by quoting from their campaign pamphlets which when exposed by sceptics led to the IPCC AR4 Report thrown into the wastebasket. This probably prompted Anthony Watts to conclude:

“While others are using the current troubles at the IPCC as a reason to argue for his resignation, they are really more of a symptom of the real problems.” 

 

Removing Pachauri and not changing its biased political agenda does nothing to right the wrong the IPCC has done to the whole science of climatology. No matter how many times the chair of IPCC is changed, another dye-in wool warmist will certainly replace a Pachuari. Pachuari will end up a scapegoat and an impression wrongly created that IPCC has been cleansed of its malady when the reality is that the IPCC will resume business-as-usual; cherry picking and misusing climate science to further the goals of its biased political agenda. IPCC scientist, Roger Pielke Jr. in his blog comments:

“Removing Pachauri and doing nothing else would do little to fix the IPCC.  Conversely, doing everything else recommended by the IAC and leaving Pachauri in place would go a long way to improving the organization.  So in many respects I see the focus on Pachauri as a distraction”

Next month 194 governments of the IPCC are scheduled to meet in Busan, South Korea. This is where any plot to ouster Pachauri could be unleashed. Pachauri remains defiant:

“At the moment, my mandate is very clear. I have to complete the fifth assessment”

The Indian Government who Pachauri is their candidate is equally defiant, backing him to the hilt. According to press reports, the Indian government has informally made it clear that if Pachauri goes, then the country may be forced to walk out of the IPCC and this may in turn trigger an exodus of important players in any future climate treaty such as the BRIC countries. So in either way, whether Pachauri stays or goes, the IPCC is toast.