Uh, oh…It’s about to become more about the people behind the letter, than the letter itself.

Now all we need is a steamy potboiler novel and some internal investigations and it could be Rajenda Pachauri all over again.

The big story at Climate Audit this week (see Shukla’s Gold) is about the twenty authors of the letter demanding that climate skeptics be put on trial, and in particular the man pushing the letter, Jagadish Shukla, seems to be getting quite prosperous with all that Koch Brothers money Oil Money public money he gets sent his way. Steve McIntyre writes:

In 2001, the earliest year thus far publicly available, in 2001, in addition to his university salary (not yet available, but presumably about $125,000), Shukla and his wife received a further $214,496 in compensation from IGES (Shukla -$128,796; Anne Shukla – $85,700). Their combined compensation from IGES doubled over the next two years to approximately $400,000 (additional to Shukla’s university salary of say $130,000), for combined compensation of about $530,000 by 2004. Shukla’s university salary increased dramatically over the decade reaching $250,866 by 2013 and $314,000 by 2014. (In this latter year, Shukla was paid much more than Ed Wegman, a George Mason professor of similar seniority). Meanwhile, despite the apparent transition of IGES to George Mason, the income of the Shuklas from IGES continued to increase, reaching $547,000 by 2013. Combined with Shukla’s university salary, the total compensation of Shukla and his wife exceeded $800,000 in both 2013 and 2014. In addition, as noted above, Shukla’s daughter continued to be employed by IGES in 2014; IGES also distributed $100,000 from its climate grant revenue to support an educational charity in India which Shukla had founded.

But it seems Shukla doesn’t like people looking into that, because the letter seems to have been disappeared from the IGES website. I’ve confirmed this over 24 hours and several search techniques. What was once visible to search engines, is no more:

The original link that no longer works: http://www.iges.org/letter/LetterPresidentAG.pdf

The letter survives on the Wayback Machine here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20150920110942/http://www.iges.org/letter/LetterPresidentAG.pdf

And here is the letter as a single image, with page 1 and 2 combined from the PDF:

Bishop Hill notes:

You can imagine the horror on the signatories’ faces when they realised that some very determined people were about to take a close interest in their financial arrangements and those of their colleagues at IGES. I’m not sure taking the letter down is going to help much though.

The Streisand effect has been unleashed Mr. Shukla, enjoy the ride.

h/t to Russell Cook

Note: shortly after publication, this story was updated to make two links active (a recent wordpress problem caused this) and a hat tip added.

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