New Delhi, April 2: Blaming alarmists, including the United Nations, for "propelling" global warming from a scientific curiosity to "the mother of all environmental scares in a little over 20 years", a new report released in India by Dr Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, has cast serious doubts over the predictions of the Nobel Prize-winning UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its recent reports. This new report has also questioned the Kyoto Protocol, which has been blamed for costing billions of dollars. The new report has accused the UN and its member countries of blaming climate change "for problems that either they have failed to address or that they have actively caused".
The Civil Society Report on Climate Change has been prepared by 41 civil society organisations present in more than 30 countries. The report has also summarised background papers of some eminent names in the field who have been critical of "undue hype" given to climate change. While releasing the report, Dr Ahluwalia said that he was critical of the recommendations of the recent UNDP report on climate change, which has toed the line of the IPCC report in its predictions. He said that the UNDP report was not balanced in respect to developing countries and all arguments that arise should be taken into consideration. "The threat has been made more visceral through clever marketing on the part of environmentalists as well as journalists who know that bad news sells. Scientists seeking funding for their research — and perhaps also suffering from ideological bias — have been happy conspirators, writing papers and appearing in the media," states the report. On predictions of climate change affecting India’s agriculture, the report states, "These observations serve to highlight the contrast between an entrepreneurial, opportunity-seeking view of the world and the misanthropic, passive recipient view promoted by alarmists." It argues that technology advancement in the field has been overlooked.
Questioning the "scaremongering" over the Kyoto Protocol by the agencies involved, this new report says that the post-Kyoto Protocol hype is an attempt to convince developing countries that a post-Kyoto Protocol agreement with binding targets and timetables for emission reductions is necessary. The report has suggested that instead of pushing emission restrictions and "failed" policies, governments should focus on reducing barriers to economic growth and adaptation methods.
Charging the IPCC report of being "inconsistent" in the forecasts of disease incidence, saying that millions of people continue to suffer even when the so-called climate change effects are not obvious, which means that what is needed is for the international community to address the problem of vaccination and treatment to these diseases like malaria and tuberculosis. The report argues that death rate from climate related natural disasters has drastically reduced since the 1920s due to economic growth and technological development and it is going to further reduce regardless of climate change.
The report states that the UN and its various agencies do not have the capacity, knowledge or competence to implement programmes that would significantly reduce incidents of predicted diseases. Accusing alarmists of using individual weather events as definitive evidence of global warming, the report has rubbished the warning that planetary warming will increase the occurrence of these events which will cause loss of lives.
