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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
sea level.
By 2020, in some African countries, crop yields
from rain-fed agriculture could reduce by 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 scriptwriter of those
typical Hollywood disaster flicks. Instead when they are coming from a
responsible global agency like the United Nations'
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), not too many would have doubted
their authenticity. Therefore, when these claims in IPCC's 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
Pachauri. Especially from the media, and 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, it's the media
excesses following IPCC's Nobel win (Indian media projected it almost
as Pachauri winning the Nobel) that's coming home to roost now.
Instead of focusing on Pachauri's lifestyle, the whistleblowers need to
analyze in detail the IPCC 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. That's not just irresponsible, but
callous too. However, the Dutch blunder was ironically owing to wrong
information from the Dutch government only. The Netherlands
Environmental Assessment Agency, which 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 doesn't 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
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 or Amazongate or Africagate
has assumed much sinister significance now. While Pachauri's 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 a personal vilification campaign. Instead, it should be more
relevant now to put the IPCC's peer-review process under the scanner.
The review process definitely needs an overhaul now. Until now, anyone
has been allowed to review any part of the IPCC drafts they liked, but
there was no coordination in the sense that say, 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 three
working groups had to be completed nearly at the same time, making it
hard for Working Group2 to properly base their discussions on the
conclusions and projections from Working Group1. This has already been
improved on for the next Assessment Report, for which the Working
Group2 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 10 full-time staff in its
secretariat at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, plus a
few staff in 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 basis, as assessed by the climatologists,
including several of the Realclimate authors.Working Group 2 (WG2)
deals with impacts of climate change on society and ecosystems, as
assessed by social scientists, ecologists, etc. Working Group 3 (WG3),
deals with mitigation options for limiting
global warming, as assessed by energy experts and 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 wrangling the public perception that seems to
be emerging is that all conclusions or warnings about 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 magnitudes of some of the prognoses are overhyped.
We need a more balanced and judicious viewpointneither should we treat
'global warming' and other dangers as imaginary fiction, nor should we
overreact to the extent 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 that reviewers' comments
are handled.
Apparently it's a classic Catch 22 situation as IPCC is a high-profile
single-focus organization whose existence depends on its own reports.
In other words it has a vested interest in promoting claims that would
guarantee its funding and justify its continued existence. This alone
should be reason enough to closely examine its procedures and claims
but the situation is made worse by the involvement of governments.
These governments not only fund the IPCC but apparently accept its
claims without question and allocate funding for
research on the basis of those findings, then repeat the process
when the next IPCC Assessment Report draws on the findings of that
government-sponsored research to support its hypothesis. The need of
the hour is to scrutinize and assess the IPCC, not digress on putting
Pachauri under the scanner. You don't like the message, then try
improving it, but please don't shoot the messenger.
IPCC: An Organization in Crisis
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