More from industrial engineer/economist/bureaucrat Pachauri

THE head of the UN's peak scientific body on climate change believes it is still possible for the world to reach an agreement that will avoid the risk of catastrophic global warming.
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In Sydney to address the Metropolis conference, Dr Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said many scientists believed that even a 450 ppm target was not strong enough. "There are a section of scientists and some analysts that are actually now saying that 450 is a bit too high and what we should be targeting is 350."

Pointing to the dangerous predicament of low lying island nations such as Kiribati and the Maldives, Dr Pachauri said: "If you talk to the president of [the] Maldives, indeed the people of the Maldive Islands, they're living in a state of fear.

"My own feeling is that attention on some of these issues will increase, it will escalate, it will snowball and as a result people are going to say, look 450 ppm itself is a bit too high."

Dr Pachauri warned the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere was already contributing to sea-level rise. If the world's big ice sheets kept melting, "you are talking about well over a metre of sea-level rise and that, to my mind, is going to be disastrous for hundreds of millions of people". The current financial crisis was "a major distraction" from climate change, he said, but ultimately it might be helpful.

"I think unbridled capitalism without any regulation, without some control, is something people are not going to accept now. And therefore there is going to be an effort to define how government and business and individuals can work together to see that issues like climate change, like carving out a new energy future can be handled effectively."

Al Gore on Pachauri, April 2002 - New York Times

Dr. Robert Watson, the highly respected leader of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, was blackballed in a memo to the White House from the nation's largest oil company. The memo had its effect last Friday, when Dr. Watson lost his bid for re-election after the administration threw its weight behind the ''let's drag our feet'' candidate, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri of New Delhi, who is known for his virulent anti-American statements.