February 3, 2010

At the Intersection of Climate Science and Voluptuous Breasts …

Photo from World Economic Forum, <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldeconomicforum/2296434553/">via Flickr</a>.

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Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has a scintillating new piece of writing. No, I’m not talking about the latest climate assessment report. In January Pachauri released his first novel, Return to Almora, which details the life and sexual conquests of Sanjay Nath, an academic in his 60s who frets over how politicians have “endangered the fragile ecosystem.”

The Telegraph has a copy and printed excerpts that might be too racy to repeat here on Blue Marble. Let’s just say it includes phrases like “caressing her voluptuous breasts” and “the excitement got the better of him, before he could even get started.”

It’s no Political Economy of Global Energy or Dynamics of Electrical Energy Supply and Demand: An Economic Analysis of course. While his climate and energy work helped win him a Nobel Peace Prize, the Telegraph posits that this work is “unlikely to win awards other than the Bad Sex in Fiction prize.”

Even without reading the whole book, I’d venture to say that Pachauri maybe should have spent more time analyzing glacial data and less time describing how Sanjay fondles heaving and/or voluptuous breasts.

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It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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