The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chaired by eminent climate scientist Rajendra Pachauri accepted on Wednesday that the panel’s calculation went wrong while drafting the report on global warming. The report published in 2007 had won Nobel Prize for its ‘accurate’ forecast.
The IPCC report had warned the wayward nations that if global warming goes unchecked, the Himalayan glaciers would ‘disappear altogether by 2035 if not sooner’.
In a statement issued yesterday, panel members expressed regret on its hasty conclusion, which was based on ‘poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers’.
An offshoot of this episode is whether the panel members benefited from tabling this erroneous report, triggering wide-scale panic. From India’s perspective, the report placed Indian negotiators at a disadvantage during the recently concluded climate summit in Copenhagen.
Union Minister of State, Jairam Ramesh, had earlier questioned the veracity of the report’s claims. To this latest revelation, he said, “My objection was to the IPCC’s prediction that they will disappear by 2035.”
“There is no doubt that the sea-level is rising and the climate is changing. What we cannot prove scientifically is ‘why’. Science may eventually have the answer, but we cannot afford to wait till science gives us all the answers. We need to get into climate mitigation now,” he said.
Ramesh added that India will be the worst affected by climate change and rising sea level, as we have 35 crore people living in coastal areas. According to him, India will continue its proposed voluntary emission cuts without any change.
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