Has Himalayan glacier melt stopped?
For the first
time in its history, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
— a panel of 2,500 of the best climate scientists in the world —
accepted on Wednesday that it had made a huge goof-up in its fourth assessment
report on climate change and withdrew its assertion that the Himalayan glaciers
ran the risk of being wiped out by 2035.
The Nobel-prize winning body, however, attempted
to soften the blow by couching its words. Its statement said: ‘‘It has come to
our attention that (the statement on Himalayan glaciers) refers to poorly
substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of
Himalayan glaciers. In drafting the paragraph in question, clear and
well-established standards of evidence, required by IPCC procedures were not
applied properly.’’
For one, the report is said to have borrowed from
a 1996 Russian study by V M Kotlyakov and bungled on the glacier melt deadline
predicted by it — the study set the deadline at 2350, while the IPCC made it
2035, perhaps due to a small typological error, but which in effect advanced
the deadline by over 300 years!
What’s remarkable is that this deadline was hotly
contested by the Indian government. The IPCC team, led by TERI chief R K
Pachauri, brushed aside these objections and didn’t even care to double-check
its facts, even though the conclusion of its findings meant as dramatic a
development as the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers in the next 25 years.
IPCC’s lack of rigour also becomes clear from the
fact that it shunned peer-reviewed science reports published in well-known
journals, and instead lifted references from a report by WWF, an NGO, that
supports strong action on climate change. It now transpires that WWF had picked
up this alarmist view from a pop-science magazine, the New Scientist.
|
|
