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World misled over glacier meltdown: Report
London: A warning that most of the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035 owing to climate change is likely to be retracted after the United Nations body that issued it admitted to a series of scientific blunders.
Two years ago, the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) headed by India's Rajendra Pachauri, issued a benchmark report that claimed to have incorporated the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming.
A central claim was that world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.
In the last few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report, The Sunday Times reported on Sunday.
It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephonic interview with Syed Hasnain, an Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, the report said.
Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was a "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research, the report added.
If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research.
The IPCC was set up to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.
Rajendra Pachauri has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as "voodoo science" and last week the IPCC refused to comment on the report.
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Glacier ‘melt’: Ramesh turns heat on Pachauri
Nitin Sethi | TNN
New Delhi: The furore over the validity of data used by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has taken some of the sheen off the Nobel Prizewinning institution’s reputation.
A day after it emerged that IPCC’s dire prediction that climate change would melt most Himalyan glaciers by 2035 was based on mere ‘speculation’, environment minister Jairam Ramesh slammed the processes of the celebrated body, saying: “Due diligence had not been followed by the Nobel peace prize-winning body.”
“The health of glaciers is a cause of grave concern but the IPCC’s alarmist position that they would melt by 2035 was not based on an iota of scientific evidence,” the environment minister said.
Ramesh recalled how IPCC chief R K Pachauri had dismissed a government agency’s doubts about the veracity of the UN body’s sensational projection about melting of glaciers. “We had issued a report by scientist V K Raina that the glaciers have not retreated abnormally. At the time, we were dismissed, saying it was based on voodoo science. But the new report has vindicated our position.”
The revelation that the data on glacial melt in the Himalayas was unverified has dented the image of the IPCC, which has set the agenda for climate talks. It has given a handle to climate sceptics who have long accused IPCC of being biased.
World bending science to force India on climate?
Nitin Sethi | TNN
New Delhi: The United Nations IPCC’s admission of getting its facts on Himalayan glaciers completely wrong has again brought out concerns over the use of science, and pseudoscience, to pressure India to take stronger action on climate change or put greater responsibility for the climate crisis on it.
The 2035 demise date drawn by the IPCC in its fourth assessment report for Himalayan glaciers was used very often to demand that India should take greater action to reduce its emissions in order to protect people from glacial melts and floods. Similarly, a ‘premature’ release of information on the so-called Asian Brown Cloud was used by several western NGOs and governments to pin the climate change blame on burning firewood and cow dung in India.
While the UN released a preliminary report suggesting India’s poor were adding to climate change by using firewood and cow dung for heating, it later retraced its steps and admitted the results were partial and preliminary in nature and clear evidence linking the haze to changes in Indian monsoon and other consequences had not been established with certainty.
The release of the report, timed closely to crucial climate negotiations where industrialised countries were keen to get India to take global commitments for reducing its emissions, did not go unnoticed.
Discussions on the Asian Brown Cloud (ABC) — a thick layer of seasonal smog that forms over parts of India, like it does in several parts of the world — continue to surface periodically even today, and unnervingly timed closed to ongoing climate negotiations. One of the key authors of the ABC phenomenon was V Ramanathan of the US-based Scripps Institute of Oceanography, who will now be funded by the Indian government to carry out further studies on the issue at TERI, IPCC chairman R K Pachauri’s institute.
One of the earliest cases of scientific manipulation that caused a furore was when the US Environment Protection Agency tried to pass the blame of climate change to poorer countries like India. It had claimed that wet paddy fields in India were emitting very high levels of methane, an extremely high potential climate warming gas but with very short life in the atmosphere. It had suggested India had to check its survival emissions — emissions by the poor to sustain at even poor levels and not demand reduction of the ‘luxury emissions’ of rich countries such as the US.
It was later found, through research done independently in India, that emissions from wet paddy fields and animal husbandry in India were less than one-tenth of that the US EPA had claimed and that their impact was highly insignificant when compared to the large volumes of emissions by the industrialised countries.
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