U.N. Climate Chief Resigns Amid SEX Scandal
by H. Sterling Burnett
Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations’ influential Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has resigned in the wake of sexual harassment allegations. I say good riddance to a bad apple!
During Pachauri’s 13-year tenure as chair of IPCC, the organization won a Nobel Peace Prize and was marred by many controversies, including the Climategate scandal and exposure of its reliance on non-peer-reviewed reports from environmental lobbying groups. Under Pachauri, no claim from environmentalists was too far-fetched to be included in IPCC’s supposedly authoritative scientific reports.
Marc Morano, executive editor of website ClimateDepot, says Pachauri had become a polarizing figure and has done IPCC a favor by resigning. “The IPCC is quietly popping champagne corks today,” Morano said. “Pachauri gone can only be good news for the U.N. IPCC.”
Morano says Pachauri should have resigned sooner. “If Pachauri had any decency, he would have resigned in the wake of the Climategate scandal, which broke in 2009,” said Morano. “Climategate implicated the upper echelon of IPCC scientists [when they attempted] to collude and craft a narrative on global warming while allowing no dissent. Or Pachauri could have resigned when he wished skeptics would rub asbestos on their faces or conceded that the IPCC was at the ‘beck and call’ of governments.
“There were so many opportunities to do the right thing and fade away,” said Morano. “But it took the proceedings of the Indian court system over the allegations of sexual harassment to finally bring Pachauri down. Things can only be looking up for the IPCC now [that it] has ridded itself of this political and ethical cancer.”
With Pachauri at the helm, each new IPCC report contained increasingly alarming claims concerning alleged dangers related to human-caused climate change, regardless of what scientific data actually revealed. In his resignation letter, Pachauri stated, “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, as much as anything else, may have been the problem with Pachauri’s term as head of IPCC. For Pachauri, battling human influence on the environment in general and global warming in particular was a religious mission he approached with the fervor of a zealot. He was not a climate scientist. Contrary evidence was to be attacked, not examined, and scientists or others who disagreed with IPCC in whole or in part were to be treated like heretics or apostates – having their careers and reputations burned at the stake.
On her blog, Nofrakkingconsensus.com, journalist Donna LaFramboise said, “Yes, the IPCC, which we’re told to take seriously because it is a scientific body producing scientific reports, has in fact been led by an environmentalist on a mission. By someone for whom protecting the planet is a religious calling.”
As the search to find Pachauri’s replacement begins, in the words of my colleague Ron Arnold, “After more than twelve years of suffering under his ideological and economic harassment, the world should have only one regret about the resignation of Rajendra Pachauri as IPCC chairman, which is there will be a replacement.”
I couldn’t agree more.
SOURCES: Heartlander and BBC News and ClimateDepot.com