So Rajendra Pachauri has finally announced his resignation from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – a decision at once momentous and spectacularly irrelevant.
It’s momentous because the IPCC is one of the world’s most powerful organizations, with presidents and prime ministers across the globe in thrall to its prognostications of climate doom, and the fate of nations and economies partly decided by its ongoing insistence (against all evidence) that “global warming” remains a credible crisis which can only be solved by throwing stupendous quantities of taxpayer money at it.
And it’s spectacularly irrelevant because the bearded, cricket-loving, ice-shunning groper was never more than an empty figurehead, probably chosen – a bit like UN Secretaries General – because he fitted the right ethnic and socio-political profile rather than because he had a particular skill set which qualified him especially for the job.
He was, after all, a railway engineer by training, not a physicist or a meteorologist or a climatologist.