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‘Glacier melting report was a mistake,’ IPCC admits
by Pankhuri kapoor - January 25, 2010 - comments
The Himalayan glaciers are melting but not at the pace that the IPCC report claimed.
Geneva, Switzerland, January 25 -- Rajendra K Pachauri, chairman of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has acknowledged that the report on the melting of the Himalayan glaciers was a mistake.
Reportedly, the Nobel Prize winning organization’s glacier melting report had goofed up by stating that the Himalayan glaciers would completely disappear by the year 2035, that is three decades from now.
Dr Pachauri says, “We realized it was a mistake and stated that very clearly in a statement. I don't want to minimize the mistake itself. But in no way does it detract from reality - that there is widespread mass loss of glaciers.”
“We have said this clearly in our synthesis report, which is the last of the four documents we bring out as part of an assessment report. This error was not there in the synthesis report. But we had a very clear statement on climate change,” he continues.
The report faces criticism by Indian Environment Ministry
It may be noted that the melting of the Himalayan glaciers has sparked off many controversies in India as the country greatly depends on these for providing water to major rivers like the Ganges.
India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, has openly raised his anger on the IPCC’s report, and said that the IPCC scientists had given the wrong facts about the glaciers and there was no evidence of the same.
The Environment Ministry also released a report in November last year which admitted that the Himalayan glaciers were indeed shrinking, but the receding pace was not an immediate cause of worry.
Skeptics also called the error report as IPCC’s ‘Vodoo Science.’
Skeptics Vs scientists
Professor Pitman, one of the lead authors of the IPCC's 2001 and 2007 reports says, “Climate scientists are losing the fight with the skeptics. The skeptics are so well funded, so well organized. They have nothing else to do.”
“All of the efforts you do in an IPCC report is done out of hours, voluntarily, for no funding and no pay, whereas the skeptics are being funded to put out full-scale misinformation campaigns and are doing a damn good job, I think. They are doing a superb job at misinforming and miscommunicating the general public, state and federal governments.”
He also accused the climate change skeptics for not verifying the report properly before calling it wrong, and said that IPCC only estimates the dates and the findings of the report are always open for discussion.
“There are two paragraphs that have been questioned in a 1600-page document. We ought to be talking about the other 1599 pages that no one has found any problems with,” he concluded.