Let the peasants walk

Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
Nov. 30, 2009

A hairshirt lecture from above - as in 35,000 feet above, in business class:

Hotel guests should have their electricity monitored; hefty aviation taxes should be introduced to deter people from flying; and iced water in restaurants should be curtailed, the world’s leading climate scientist has told the Observer.

Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warned that western society must undergo a radical value shift if the worst effects of climate change were to be avoided. A new value system of “sustainable consumption” was now urgently required, he said.

Of course, this new asecetic lifestyle cannot possibly be imposed on a man as grand as Pachauri, with such crucial work to do to save us from the gases he belches out the back of his jet:

I recently examined a UN document entitled ”Details of Outreach Activities carried out by Chairman IPCC, Dr. R. K. Pachauri Jan '07 July '08?

Dr Rajendra Pachauri flew at least 443,243 miles on IPCC business in this 19 month period. This business included honorary degree ceremonies, a book launch and a Brookings Institute dinner, the latter involving a flight of 3500 miles.

Add to his business flights this example of “sustainable consumption”:

So strong is his love for cricket that his colleagues recall the time the Nobel winner took a break during a seminar in New York and flew in to Delhi over the weekend to attend a practice session for a match before flying back. Again, he flew in for a day, just to play that match.

Jonathan Foreman also wonders whether Pachauri has urged the guests at his global warming party next week to avoid catching those sinful planes:

The Copenhagen summit next week will generate vast quantities of hot air. It will see 16,500 people coming in from 192 countries. That amounts to 41,000 tons of carbon dioxide, roughly the same as the carbon emissions of Morocco in 2006. Also, the organisers will lay 900 kilometres of computer cable and 50,000 square miles of carpet. More than 200,000 meals will be served and visitors will drink 200,000 cups of coffee -- at least that will be organic.

(Thanks to reader Debbie.)

UPDATE

Meanwhile Pachauri becomes a denier of scientific corruption occuring right under his nose:

Rajendra Pachauri defended the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the wake of apparent suggestions in emails between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that they had prevented work they did not agree with from being included in the panel’s fourth assessment report, which was published in 2007....

“The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report,” he said....

Pachauri was responding to one email from 2004 in which Professor Phil Jones, the head of the climatic research unit at UEA, said of two papers he regarded as flawed: “I can’t see either ... being in the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow "“ even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Pachauri said it was not clear whether the wording of the emails reflected the scientists’ intended actions, but said: “I really think people should be discreet ... in this day and age anything you write, even privately, could become public and to put anything down in writing is, to say the least, indiscreet...”

So when Pachauri reads IPCC scientists saying they’ll “keep ... out” sceptical papers from, the IPCC, he thinks that’s unclear? Just “indiscreet” wording?

And how can he be so confident that such bias was kept out of the IPCC when, for instance, Climategate scientist Michael Mann, another IPCC author, managed to insert his now discredited “hockey stick” graph into the third IPCC report to falsely “prove” the world hadn’t been warmer in thousands of years?

How can he be so confident that bias didn’t infect the whole process, when another IPCC author and Climategate scientist, Kevin Trenberth, was privately admitting that the real-world data wasn’t matching the IPCC models on which global warming theory is based:

...where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record… The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.

UPDATE 2

Reader Charles says as recently as last month Trenberth. a leading expert in climate models, was privately admitting other Climategate scientists to huge uncertainties in them - caused by the fact that the world wasn’t behaving as they’d predicted:

How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless...