Unbowed But Sinking Fast

The drip, drip bad news for the IPCC continues. This Times of London piece has Greenpeace calling for Rajendra Pachauri’s head. Greenpeace!

But that’s not what’s notable in the story. To me, It’s Pachauri’s utter obliviousness to the quicksand that is swallowing him. Here he is asserting his gravitas:

My credibility has been established because I was re-elected chairman in 2008 by all the countries of the world. They must have been satisfied with what I did in terms of the fourth assessment report [published in 2007] because they have given me the mandate of completing the fifth assessment report [[to be released over 2013 and 2014] which I intend doing.

Yeah, and Nixon was reelected in a landslide in 1972. Not that I’m comparing Pachauri’s mistakes to Tricky Dick’s sins. The point is, in public life, new information about a person sometimes comes to light that casts you in a new light. Or shreds your credibility. (And that can happen more by the way you handle those revelations, which I think is the case with Pachauri.) I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that John Edwards was a very viable presidential candidate. It wasn’t that long ago that Tiger Woods was…oh, you get the point.

The only way Pachauri claws out of the quicksand is if he changes his tune and stops sounding like a peevish victim. He’s got to man up and show some contrition. So far, it seems pretty clear that’s not about to happen.