Rajendra Pachauri, a notable climate change expert, is now pointing to global warming skeptics for his fall from grace as he faces legal troubles that could land him in jail. The former head of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced his resignation from the position in February 2015 after he was accused of sexual harassment on two separate occasions.
The resignation was prompted in particular by a 33-page complaint filed by an unnamed woman that claims Pachauri subjected her to "unwanted physical advances" through numerous electronic messaging tools including email and text messages. Some of these messages included poems and other romantic writings from the climate expert, who is also the author of a romantic novel.
"I am yours for life," Pachauri wrote to one of the women. "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 wrote to the other.
Although Pachauri had remained silent about the incidents throughout the ordeal, he recently released an onslaught of emails that reveal his belief that much of his problems from these texts and emails are due to a "witch-hunt" conducted by global warming critics, skeptics and deniers, implying a sophisticated sting against him.
"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, which to anyone would seem very unusual," he said. "As far as I know, the emails, text messages etc. that she collected were personal, semi-personal and only in a few cases official."
Pachauri is the winner of the 2007 Noble peace prize, which he shared with former Vice President Al Gore. Although once considered a maven within the climate science community, the recent events have destroyed his reputation, along with individuals and groups closely associated with him.
Since the accusations, the Yale Climate & Energy Institute (YCEI), a climate change researcher engine that Pachauri used to run, announced that it will shut down in June after the university decided to cut off its funding.
"Yale's decision to close its doors on its climate institute has to be in part related to Pachauri," said Marc Morano, a publisher of Climate Depot, an online outlet reporting on climate issues. "His behavior has cast a long shadow on the organizations that he has been affiliated with."
