Credibility Crisis

• By the year 2035, 80% of the Himalayan glacier area would melt and
  disappear from the face of the earth.
• Netherlands is highly susceptible to both sea level rise and river
  flooding as 55% of its territory is below the sea level.
• By 2020, in some African countries, crop yields from rain-fed
  agriculture could reduce upto 50%.
• Upto 40% of the Amazonian forests could die due to even a slight
  reduction in precipitation or early advent of drought.

These are fairly serious doomsday prophecies. And, they are not the figments
of imagination of a sci-fi novel or the scrpitwriter of those typical Hollywood
disaster flicks. Instead when they are coming from a responsible global agency
like the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), not
too many would have doubted their authenticity. Therefore, when these claims in
IPCCs Fourth Assessment Report are found to be false, the severe flak the
august body is taking seems to be justified.

That however does not justify the personal diatribes raging against the IPCC
chief, Rajendra Pachauri, especially from the media, particularly the respected
British newspaper, Guardian. Somehow it looks like a witchhunt out there with
the motive to displace Pachauri. True, in case of loss of credibility for IPCC,
Pachauri as the head should not escape censure. But that does not imply reams
being written about his Golf Links home in Delhi or his supposed haughtiness.
Perhaps, its the media excesses following IPCCs Nobel win (Indian media
projected it almost like Pachauri winning the Nobel), thats coming home to
roost now.

Instead of focusing on Pachauris lifestyle, the whistle blowers need to
analyze in detail the IPCCs mistakes. The forecast of glaciers melting was
indeed a Himalayan blunder: it seems 2035 was a typo for 2350. And, even the
2350 timeline was only lifted from a media report published almost a decade
back. Thats not just irresponsible, but callous too. However, the Dutch blunder
was ironically owing to the wrong information from the Dutch government only.
The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency later published a correction
stating that the sentence should have read 55% of the Netherlands is at risk of
flooding; 26% of the country is below sea level, and 29% is susceptible to river
flooding. While in this case, the Dutch government was equally gullible, it
still doesnt absolve IPCC of accepting any data at face value even from a
government agency.

Even the statements that 40% of Amazon forests could die due to drought or
attributing the rise in disaster costs to climate change are fraught with
inaccuracies and are really poorly warranted claims. The Amazongate
information was apparently not an IPCC or any peer journal study, but taken from
some old WWF report whose scientific veracity is not 100% established. The bone
of contention with the trends in disaster losses seems to be another debatable
graph provided in the report. While IPCC votaries may quibble that all
information might not be glaringly wrong like the Himalayan glaciers, the fact
of the matter is the less than 100% reliable provenance of most of these data
has now cast a doubt over whatever IPCC says.

Now suddenly there are skeptics who have started minutely scrutinizing
whatever IPCC says; the Himalayan blunder, Amazongate, Africagate have assumed
sinister significance now. While Pachauris apparent defiance on the face of
some of these allegations should have been dismissed merely as churlish, some
critics seem to hang on them to run more of a personal villification campaign.
Instead, it should be more relevant now to put the IPCCs peer-review process
under the scanner.

The review process definitely needs an overhaul now. Till now, anyone has
been allowed to review any part of the IPCC drafts they liked, but there was no
coordination, like a glacier expert was specifically assigned to double-check
parts of the Working Group2 chapter on Asia. Such a practice would likely have
caught the Himalayan glacier mistake. Another problem has been that reports of
all the three working groups had to be completed nearly at the same time, making
it hard for Working Group 2 to properly base their discussions on the
conclusions and projections from Working Group1. This has already been improved
for the next Assessment Report, for which the Working Group 2 report can be
completed six months after the Working Group1 report.

Maybe this needs a little elucidation on these working groups. The IPCC is
not a large organization. It has only ten full time staff in its secretariat at
the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, plus a few staff in the four
technical support units that help the chairs of the three IPCC working groups
and the national greenhouse gas inventories group. The actual work of the IPCC
is done by unpaid volunteers, thousands of scientists at universities and
research institutes around the world who contribute as authors or reviewers to
the completion of the IPCC reports.

The three working groups are Working Group 1 (WG1) which deals with the
physical climate science as assessed by the climatologists, including several
Realclimate authors. Working Group 2 (WG2) deals with the impacts of climate
change on society and ecosystems as assessed by social scientists, ecologists,
etc. Working Group 3 (WG3) deals with the mitigation options for limiting global
warming as assessed by energy experts, economists. Assessment reports are
published every six or seven years, and writing them takes about three years.
Each working group publishes one of the three volumes of each assessment. The
focus of the recent allegations is the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) which was
published in 2007.

However, amidst all these wranglings, the public perception that seems to be
emerging is that all conclusions or warnings about the human impacts on the
climate system are flawed and concerns about the risks of future climate change
are misplaced. The danger is definitely lurking around the corneronly the
magnitude of some of the prognoses are over-hyped. We need a more balanced and
judicious viewpointneither should we treat global warming and other dangers
as imaginary fiction, nor should we over-react to the extent that it is shown
that the end of the world is in 2012. And, that puts an extra onus on the IPCC
that in its next assessment, it must be more scrupulous in adhering to its basic
ground rules. It also probably means that the rules must be revised, especially
regarding the use of non-peer-reviewed sources and the ways in which reviewers
comments are handled.

The need of the hour is to scrutinize and assess the IPCC, not digress on
putting Pachauri under the scanner. You dont like the message then try
improving it, but please dont shoot the messenger.

Rajneesh De

rajneeshd@cybermedia.co.in