As ipcc’s alarmist chief digs a hole for himself and his tribe and puts up a weak defence for his blunders, it is time for the world to put him in his place and salvage the credibility of the cause, writes Vikas Kumar
Rajendra K. Pachauri’s “Himalayan blunder” is showing no signs of melting away. If anything, it is snowballing into a major global fracas that threatens to put the credibility of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that he heads under a cloud.
The 69-year-old chairman of the UN-mandated IPCC finds himself in the eye of a blizzard of controversies not only over the panel’s claim that Himalayan glaciers will be gone forever by the year 2035, but also due to his alleged conflicts of interest that stem from his direct and indirect association with many firms and institutions that have a stake in the burgeoning carbon credit market.
Since the glacier controversy erupted and the director-general of TERI admitted to “one mistake in a 1000-page report”, many more glaring errors of fact and deduction have tumbled out of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (4th AR), which had, in 2007, fetched Pachauri and his team of researchers a joint Nobel Prize alongside former US vice-president and one of the world’s best-known climate change warriors, Al Gore.
The roots of the current controversy can be traced back to last November, when Pachauri aggressively debunked a study by Dr V.K. Raina, one of India’s leading glaciologists. In a discussion paper, Dr Raina had questioned the IPCC’s alarmist conclusion on the rate of the melting of the Himalayan glaciers due to climate change.
The study authored by Dr Raina, ‘Himalayan Glaciers: A State-of-the-Art Review of Glacial Studies, Glacial Retreat and Climate Change’, took the position that “it might be premature to make a statement that the glaciers in the Himalayas are retreating abnormally because of climate change.” Dr Raina, a retired deputy director-general of the Geological Survey of India, asserted that there was no “scientific evidence” to link the retreating Himalayan glaciers to the phenomenon of climate change. Pachauri dismissed the report as “voodoo science”.
In his broadside against Dr Raina’s study, the IPCC chief said the glaciologist was out to “trivialise” science. Not only did Pachauri raise questions about the academic worth of the study, he also accused the Union minister of state for environment, Jairam Ramesh, who had supported Dr Raina’s conclusions, of being arrogant. “It can’t be on the basis of what two persons, the minister and one more person, think. It is going against the findings of the IPCC. It creates a sense of complacency that climate change is not for real,” Pachauri had scoffed.
Rajendra K. Pachauri’s “Himalayan blunder” is showing no signs of melting away. If anything, it is snowballing into a major global fracas that threatens to put the credibility of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that he heads under a cloud.
The 69-year-old chairman of the UN-mandated IPCC finds himself in the eye of a blizzard of controversies not only over the panel’s claim that Himalayan glaciers will be gone forever by the year 2035, but also due to his alleged conflicts of interest that stem from his direct and indirect association with many firms and institutions that have a stake in the burgeoning carbon credit market.
Since the glacier controversy erupted and the director-general of TERI admitted to “one mistake in a 1000-page report”, many more glaring errors of fact and deduction have tumbled out of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (4th AR), which had, in 2007, fetched Pachauri and his team of researchers a joint Nobel Prize alongside former US vice-president and one of the world’s best-known climate change warriors, Al Gore.
The roots of the current controversy can be traced back to last November, when Pachauri aggressively debunked a study by Dr V.K. Raina, one of India’s leading glaciologists. In a discussion paper, Dr Raina had questioned the IPCC’s alarmist conclusion on the rate of the melting of the Himalayan glaciers due to climate change.
The study authored by Dr Raina, ‘Himalayan Glaciers: A State-of-the-Art Review of Glacial Studies, Glacial Retreat and Climate Change’, took the position that “it might be premature to make a statement that the glaciers in the Himalayas are retreating abnormally because of climate change.” Dr Raina, a retired deputy director-general of the Geological Survey of India, asserted that there was no “scientific evidence” to link the retreating Himalayan glaciers to the phenomenon of climate change. Pachauri dismissed the report as “voodoo science”.
In his broadside against Dr Raina’s study, the IPCC chief said the glaciologist was out to “trivialise” science. Not only did Pachauri raise questions about the academic worth of the study, he also accused the Union minister of state for environment, Jairam Ramesh, who had supported Dr Raina’s conclusions, of being arrogant. “It can’t be on the basis of what two persons, the minister and one more person, think. It is going against the findings of the IPCC. It creates a sense of complacency that climate change is not for real,” Pachauri had scoffed.
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