‘Busy’ IPCC ignored erroneous Himalayan glaciers report

Rajendra K Pachauri, head of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was informed about the UN body’s mistake with respect to Himalayan glaciers before the Copenhagen summit, but he failed to take any action. Reason: IPCC was busy preparing for the summit, Chetan Chauhan reports. TERI got Rs 56 lakh to run UN climate meetings

Updated on: Jan 31, 2010, 24:54:01 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Rajendra K Pachauri, head of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was informed about the UN body’s mistake with respect to Himalayan glaciers before the Copenhagen summit, but he failed to take any action. Reason: IPCC was busy preparing for the summit.

The IPCC had last week expressed regret for stating that most Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.

In an interview published in Science magazine, Pachauri admitted for that first time that Pallav Bagla, a correspondent with the magazine, had informed him about the error in IPCC report on Himalayas in November 2009.

“We were working round the clock with several things that had to be done in Copenhagen. It was only when the story broke, I think in December, we decided to, well, early this month — as a matter of fact… that we decided to go into it and we moved very fast and within 3 or 4 days, we were able to come up with a clear and a very honest and objective assessment of what had happened,” Pachauri told the magazine.

Bagla told Hindustan Times that he had informed Pachauri that Grahman Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University and a lead glaciologist, had dismissed the IPCC claim of 2035 wrong by over 300 years. Cogley believed the IPCC had misread the date in a 1996 report of a Russian scientist, which said the glaciers could melt significantly by 2350.

Pachauri said as head of IPCC he took full responsibility for the mistake. “Unfortunately, in this case, we shouldn't have picked up the source we used for our assessment, and we have admitted that mistake. But I think the larger issue is that we really don’t have enough research-based information on what is happening to our glaciers. It’s a fact,” he said.

Pachauri had earlier told HT that admission of the mistake on part of IPCC enhanced its credibility and shows that it was a truly scientific body committed to the cause of climate change.

Will reduce emission, India tells UN

India told the United Nations (UN) on Saturday that it would reduce the emission intensity of its GDP by 20-25 per cent by 2020, excluding agriculture, as its “non-binding” domestic mitigation action under the Copenhagen Accord.

This comes a day after United States told UN that it would reduce its carbon emissions by 28 percent by 2020 off its 2008 levels, which actually meant just four per cent to the 1990 level. Europe had announced to reduce its emissions by 20 per cent of the 1990 levels by 2020.

The 26 countries, which had formulated the Copenhagen accord in December, had agreed to submit their mitigation action to UN by January 31.

“While these actions will be in the nature of India’s contribution to the global efforts to address climate change, India has clarified that its domestic mitigation actions will be entirely voluntary in nature and will not have a legally binding character,” the Environment and Forest ministry said in a statement.

India has also made it clear that its domestic mitigation actions will not apply to agriculture sector, which contributes 19 per cent to the country’s total green house gas emissions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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