The chairman of the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Dr Rajendra K Pachauri is stepping down from his post amidst legal sexual harassment charges that have been filed by female co-workers in India, according to this article in the The Hindu and this article from Reuters. He is also taking a leave from his position as director of The Energy and Resources Institute. Pachauri has held the position with the IPCC since 2002. In this position he has been an outspoken global warming alarmist, accepting the Nobel Prize on behalf of the IPCC along with Al Gore in 2007. His views are quite extreme. He has adopted a strict vegetarian diet, not because of his Hindu religion but because of what he perceives as its climate change implications, apparently taking the view that his personal eating habits can change the climate. What is particularly interesting is that Pachauri, like Gore, has no credentials in climate science. Not really surprising, the media never questions his authority on climate issues because of this. This is in spite of the fact that alarmists and their allies in the press are typically quick to point out when a non climate scientist on the more skeptical side of the debate speaks out on the subject. Here is Wikipedia’s description of his educational background. His training is in engineering and economics. Note it includes a Ph.D. in economics from NC State University.

Pachauri was born in Nainital, India. He was educated at La Martiniere College in Lucknow and at the Indian Railways Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering in Jamalpur, Bihar. He belongs to the Special Class Railway Apprentices, 1958 Batch, an elite scheme which heralded the beginning of mechanical engineering education in India. He began his career with the Indian Railways at the Diesel Locomotive Works in Varanasi. He joined the North Carolina State University in Raleigh, USA, where he obtained an MS in Industrial Engineering in 1972, and a PhD with co-majors in Industrial Engineering and Economics in 1974. His doctoral thesis was titled, A dynamic model for forecasting of electrical energy demand in a specific region located in North and South Carolina. He lives in Golf Links, New Delhi. He is a strict vegetarian, largely because of “the environmental and climate change implications.”