Jean-Pascal van Ypersele reckons global warming will kill Prince William, and that is only one of his many unhinged prophecies. A man who strikes many as an all-round cad and thoroughly deplorable fellow, he trades in schemes and slurs to silence sceptics. Oh, and one other thing: He aims to head the IPCC
Brussels BS-erPlease don’t tell Kate Middleton! We don’t want to upset her, but a leading IPCC scientist has predicted that in 2039, her bloke, King William V, will die at 57 from the West Nile virus as a result of the planet’s IPCC-predicted global warming.
The scientist is Belgium’s Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, and he made the forecast in a tract written for Greenpeace in 2004. At the time, he was Vice-Chair of the IPCC’s Working Group 11 for the 2007 Fourth Report. He has since risen to Vice-Chair of the IPCC itself, one of three Vice-Chairs directly below IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri. (The other two are from South Korea and that powerhouse of climate-change science, Sudan).
But wait, there’s more! Ypersele is the first to put up his hand to be elected the next IPCC chair when that position is up for grabs late next year. He has the full and proud backing of the Belgian government. In a year he could be the most influential scientist on the planet!
Find it odd for a supposedly impartial IPCC boffin to be writing reports for Greenpeace? (And did he get paid, by the way?). No, it’s not at all odd. Chair Pachauri himself wrote doom-laden intros for Greenpeace tracts in 2007 and 2008. The IPCC’s writing team for the Fifth Report included various Greenpeace alumni[i], and IPCC reports cheerfully cite Greenpeace among their sources.[ii]
Apart from killing off our future king in 2039, Ypersele’s 40-year forecast for 2044 is a catalogue of horrors extreme even by the standards of his catastropharian peers. Even Tim “No More Rain” Flannery, who fancied Perth as a drought-denuded ghost town, seems almost sane by comparison. According to the ambitious alarmist from Brussels, here are the high-temperature torments the world has coming:
•Belgian irrigation drying up with the river Meuse
•Farmers suiciding outside the Prime Minister’s office
•The Paris-Berlin high-speed train departing its buckled rail tracks and killing 52 passengers
•Heat-death corpses stacked in the improvised morgue of Antwerp’s cold stores
•Desperate Egyptians flooding Belgium as they flee the rising Mediterranean
•Belgian workers inundate Norway in quest of somewhere to cool down, then refuse to return
•Turkey and Syria are at war over water access
•The female US President — Hilary Clinton, perhaps, finally fulfilling her ambition at the age of 96? – dispatches a dozen submarines to seed the Southern Ocean with iron powder in a desperate bid to increase its CO2 absorption capacity.