Noted climate change guru Rajendra Pachauri is blaming man-made global warming skeptics for his legal troubles after looking at a possible prison sentence and a long fall from grace.
The former head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Pachauri announced in February 2015 he was resigning from his position at the UN after two women accused him of sexual harassment. His decision was prompted by a 33-page complaint by an unnamed woman alleging that Pachauri engaged in “unwanted physical advances” through email, text messages, and other electronic messaging tools, The Times of India reported in 2015.
The sordid messages include poems and sweet nothings delivered via text and email to the accuser, a former colleague of Pachauri’s .
“I am yours for life,” Pachauri, who is also the author of a romantic novel, wrote at one point in his exchanges with the woman. “I have never felt so overwhelmingly in love as I have been with you, and even though you gave me so much pain, I will always be your well-wisher and carry beautiful memories of the joyous moments between us, limited as they might have been,” he added in another.
He continued overtures, telling the woman in an email message: “I will go on a fast after a cricket match … I will break the fast only when you believe I love you with sincerity and unfathomable depth.”
The accuser was not amused by Pachauri’s advances.
“Please you are not to grab me and or kiss me,” she told the former IPCC chairman in one text, to which he replied: “I wish you would see the difference between something tender and loving and something crass and vulgar.”
He has kept his mouth shut so far about the incidents up until now. In a slew of emails to the Observer, Pachauri blamed much of the fallout from the texts and emails on what he calls a witch hunt by global warming so-called deniers, skeptics and critics. He claims he is the victim of entrapment by his enemies.
“What is disturbing [is] that right from the first day over a period of about 16 months she was creating and assembling an archive of messages,” he told The Observer, “which to anyone would seem very unusual. As far as I know, the emails, text messages etc. that she collected were personal, semi-personal and only in a few cases official.”
He added that it is possible someone could have sent messages to her using his identity.
The former maven of the climate science research community also claimed a cabal of critics and haters may have swiped several of his private poems and short stories, sending them to the accuser to make it appear as if he was sending lewd comments.
“There are emails, SMS messages and WhatsApp messages which categorically prove to the contradictory. It is a blatant lie being stated by Mr. Pachauri,” the accuser’s lawyer, Prashant Mendiratta, told reporters.
The allegations against the winner of the 2007 Nobel peace prize (which he shared with former Vice President Al Gore) has caved in his career as a leader in the climate science field and brought a wake of destruction in its path for all groups associated with Pachauri.
The Yale Climate & Energy Institute (YCEI), a climate change research engine formerly run by Pachauri, for instance, will close down in June following the University’s decision to cut its funding.
While the official reason for YCEI’s decision is a lack of funding, other energy insiders believe the decision was made in part as a result of the group’s former director’s legal troubles.
“Yale’s decision to close its doors on its climate institute has to be in part related to Pachauri. His behavior has cast a long shadow on the organizations that he has been affiliated with,” Marc Morano, publisher of Climate Depot, an online outlet reporting on climate issues, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in a March 2 interview.
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