Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the former climate scientist who shared the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace, has issued his most vehement denials to date of claims that he wrote the blue-rinse porno Return to Almora.

In spite of the science swami’s name emblazoned across its cover, the bizarre text bears little sign of being written by the serious thinker who was entrusted with leading the United Nations’ IPCC for thirteen years.

Almora shot to notoriety in 2011 when Christopher Hitchens, the titan of Anglo-American letters, used his dying breath to ridicule the book. Hitchens’ last words were said to be: “[The Pseudopachauri’s] palaver—for I’m unable to call it prose—manages to be puerile and senile at the same time. Nurse, how is it possible?”

The novel is too execrable to be quoted here. Morbidly curious readers will have no trouble finding excerpts online, and there is nothing we can do to stop them, but Climate Nuremberg will not condone the hoax by linking to it.

Vociferous denial

Appearing on India’s NDTV yesterday, Dr Pachauri reiterated that he bears “absolutely no responsibility” for the geriatric bodice-ripper, which he called “the work of independent authors—they’re to blame”.

Any connection he has with the book begins and ends with the royalty checks he receives from its disappointing sales, he stressed.

That hasn’t stopped opponents of science trotting out the stilted, incompetent smut at every opportunity in their desperation to discredit Pachauri, who probably embodies science more than anyone else in the entire climate movement.

In the face of provocations no scientist should have to endure, the 75-year-old has always kept it classy and turned the other cheek. And it’s this Gandhi-like commitment to staying above the ad-hominem fray at all times—perhaps more than any other quality—with which he has earned not only the moral high ground, but the respect of both sides in Science v Antiscience.

“I don’t want to get down to a personal level,” he says, refusing to stoop to the rhetoric of smear and delegitimization endemic to denialists, “but all you need to do is look at their backgrounds. They are people who deny the link between smoking and cancer; they are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder—I hope that they apply it to their faces every day.”

For Dr Pachauri’s full remarks, scroll down to his fascinating Question & Answer with CN reporter Kay Fabe.

It’s not just Pachauri who protests his innocence of the literary crime that is Almora—even his own lawyers appear to believe him.

As we speak, attorneys for the climatological éminence grise are busy seeking an injunction to have every copy of the soft-core cringe-maker pulped. They’re hopeful it will be granted before the Indian public is irremediably poisoned against their client.

“To permit this artifact to remain in circulation would be to give success to the conspiracy which is aimed to destroy the reputation, standing, goodwill and repute of the plaintiff,” Pachauri’s legal team told an Indian High Court judge this week.

“Our client was never the author of such objectionable material.”

Credibility boost

Pachauri’s word would carry more than enough weight on its own, but it was corroborated last week by no less a personage than Germaine Greer, reveals close Pachauri friend Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Dr Greer, the feminist icon whose handsomely aging features still recall the heartbreaker who set more than just bras on fire in her university days, dismissed the novel as “prurient, pubescent and so not Patchy,” if Tyson recalls correctly.

According to early-1970s Sydney University lore, explains Tyson, Ms Greer’s vulva was off limits to mere males—until the day two smooth-talking foreigners introduced themselves in Manning Bar. Within minutes Greer had nominated the swarthy dreamboats, Tyson and Pachauri, to make a woman of her. (She would later write of her double deflowering that “the semen flowed like tap-water,” a phrase every Australian schoolchild knows by heart, adds Tyson.)

“Sanjay [Pachauri] was magnificent, especially after meditation. Whoever wrote this [Return to Almora] pap knows nothing about women’s bodies,” Tyson recalls Dr Greer saying last week.

“Titillating? Almora doesn’t even rise to the level of arsillating. I’m always on the lookout for a good shower-nozzle read, but nothing in this book got me remotely hard.

“And as for characterization, help me out here: is the [book’s] hero supposed to be an old hand at lechery, a bungling virgin, or what? Who cares. (The authors clearly didn’t; you’ll find a more fully-realised protagonist in the average letter to Penthouse.)”

Greer’s remarks, complete with irreproachable UK English spelling, were made at the palatial London home where she holds court these days, says Tyson.

Whether his visit to Britain was “of the nature of a booty call,” Dr Tyson was too much of a gentleman to say—though he is on record stating that he “would [still] tap that sexagenarian sexbag [Greer] in a [fucking] heartbeat” given the chance.

The 398-page forgery remains under investigation in Dr Pachauri’s home country.

Lodhi Street Detective Squad in Delhi will neither confirm nor deny that it is treating Almora as the work of the elusive ‘FOIA,’ the science-abhorring tech whizz wanted in connection with the University of East Anglia break-in of November, 2009.

Also known as ‘Climategate,’ it was that act of cyberterrorism which blew the lid on Britain’s hidden culture of “good scientists just doing the scientific work good scientists do, and doing it good,” as an official inquiry later put it. It was a blow from which the credibility of climate science has never really recovered in the public mind.

Clarification

Dr Greer has disputed the details of our story, denying she had a pristine hymen the year Sydney University’s Manning Bar opened.

Contacted for his reaction, Dr Tyson conceded he “may have misspoken,” and that “it might be better to characterize Ms Greer as like a virgin” during the events in question.

Greer says she has no idea who Tyson is.

Apology

An earlier version of the wording of this article described Dr Greer as “a leading light in the second, good-looking, wave of Western feminists—of which she was the only member.”

We apologize for mentioning this.

A Question and An Answer with Dr Rajendra K Pachauri

KAY FABE CN Staff Reporter

KF: The world has seen very little of Rajendra Pachauri since January this year. How are you?

RP: I would say there are nefarious designs behind people trying to attack me with lies and falsehoods.

It doesn’t take a genius to arrive at the conclusion that apparently this [jabbing a hardback copy of ‘Return to Almora’ with his index finger] is carefully orchestrated. These things are certainly not happening at random.

I have no evidence. It’s only a surmise. But there is enough evidence to show that, for instance, in Washington, DC, the number of lobbyists has increased many fold and from what I read from the Centre for Public Integrity, 770 companies are supporting some of these lobbyists. And certainly some of them are active on the other side of the Atlantic as well. What they are indulging in is skulduggery of the worst kind.

I am puzzled where this magical book has come from. I’d like to find out the secret source of this divine intervention. I don’t understand the logic of this. Return to Almora is something indefensible.

Let someone publish a decent credible publication, otherwise we can just throw it into the dustbin.

This novel has indicated misuse of my computer resources and communication devices, without my permission or consent. From reading the book, I have come to know the factum that my computer resources including my email IDs, mobile phone and WhatsApp messages have been hacked and that unknown cyber criminals have gone ahead and have unauthorisedly accessed my computer resources and communication devices and further committed various criminal activities.

This is another attempt by the climate skeptics to discredit the IPCC. They now want to go after me and hope that it would serve their purpose. You can think of some fossil fuel companies, you can think of those who are in the business of exporting fossil fuels and of course those who earn a living from the automobile industry. This is an organized bloc of vested interests.

I don’t want to get down to a personal level, but all you need to do is look at their backgrounds.

They are people who deny the link between smoking and cancer; they are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder—I hope that they apply it to their faces every day [and get mesothelioma and die]—and people who say that the only way to deal with HIV/AIDS is to screen the population on a regular basis and isolate those who are infected. I’m reasonably sure that very soon people will realize the truth and also question the credentials of some of the people who are behind this book.

And you?

KF: Oh, can’t complain.

RP: Because no one would listen.

KF: [laughs] Exactly! Thank you, Dr Pachauri, for talking with Climate Nuremberg.

Next time on A Question and An Answer, my guest will be Professor Stephan Lewandowsky. I’ll be asking a double-barreled question: why is it that science deniers always think they’re being plotted against—and what can we do, as a society, to convince them it’s the other way round?