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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At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

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So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

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