Green Weenie of the Week: Rajendra Pachauri

Pachauri, at the right. In case you were wondering.

Can it really be that in all these months we’ve never given the coveted Power Line Green Weenie Award to the railroad engineer who heads the IPCC, the egregious Rajendra Pachauri?  As the official co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Al Gore, Pachauri deserves a weenie on general principle alone.  While he may know railroad engineering, whose connection to climate science is unclear, he is certainly ignorant of Godwin’s Law, having compared Bjorn Lomborg to Hitler after Lomborg, in conjunction with several Nobel Prize winners in economics, concluded that the carbon controls beloved of the climate campaign fail every conceivable cost-benefit test.  Pachauri told a Danish newspaper in 2004: “What is the difference between Lomborg’s view of humanity and Hitler’s?  If you were to accept Lomborg’s way of thinking, then maybe what Hitler did was the right thing.”

Last week Pachauri told The Australian newspaper (registration required) that indeed global temperatures have been flat for 17 years now, but in typical Climatespeak (where is Orwell when we need him?) that it would require 30 to 40 years to indicate that the long-term warming trend is over:

The UN’s climate change chief, Rajendra Pachauri, has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises, confirmed recently by Britain’s Met Office, but said it would need to last “30 to 40 years at least” to break the long-term global warming trend. Dr Pachauri, the chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that open discussion about controversial science and politically incorrect views was an essential part of tackling climate change.

And what about the ironclad “consensus”?  Pachauri seems to be going off-script:

In a wide-ranging interview on topics that included this year’s record northern summer Arctic ice growth, the US shale-gas revolution, the collapse of renewable energy subsidies across Europe and the faltering European carbon market, Dr Pachauri said no issues should be off-limits for public discussion. “Science only thrives on the basis of questioning,” Dr Pachauri said. He said there was “no doubt about it” that it was good for controversial issues to be “thrashed out in the public arena”.

Rajendra Pa. . . no, wait.

This slight deviation should be enough to get him fired from the IPCC.  I can’t figure out why he’s lasted this long.  He has many of the same conflicts of interest as Gore (i.e., like Gore, Pachauri is closely involved with energy schemes that benefit from greenhouse gas regulation), but Pachauri is also the author of a soft-core pornographic novel.  The main character is an aging environmentalist and engineer engaged in a “spiritual journey” that includes meeting Shirley MacLaine, detailed explorations of the Kama Sutra, and group sex.

Not sure whether we should send Pachauri his Green Weenie.  He might not treat it with the proper respect.

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