Jan. 18: Union minister for environment Jairam Ramesh believes his ministry’s stand that the Himalayan glaciers were not going to disappear in the next three decades now stands vindicated.
A benchmark study undertaken by scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN body regarded as the world’s top authority on climate change, had warned that global warming would result in the disappearance of all the Himalayan glaciers by 2035.
"The IPCC study, it turns out, was not based on an iota of scientific evidence and is expected to be retracted shortly," said Mr Ramesh.
The scientists behind the IPCC study now admit that their warning was based on a new story which had appeared in a London-based popular science journal, which in turn was based on a short telephonic interview conducted with Prof. Syed Hasnain, who was earlier in JNU and is presently heading the glaciology division of TERI.
While Prof. Hasnain did not respond to repeated telephonic queries, he was quoted in the IPCC study as stating that "all the Himalayan glaciers are in retreat".
Mr Ramesh admits that "glaciers are in a poor state and many are indeed receding, but that does not provide us with decisive proof that all glaciers will vanish by 2035. To say that was to adopt an extremely alarmist position," the minister said.
To counter these charges, the ministry has voted the setting up of an Indian Network for Comprehensive Climate Assessment which will have 127 research institutes and 250 scientists working under its wing.
"There is no substitute for domestic scientific capability especially this is the second time the West has taken us for a ride. The first time was in 1990, when the United States Environmental Protection Agency had predicted that India’s wet paddy cultivation was resulting in methane emission of 38 million tonnes per year.
A study conducted by Indian scientists established that the actual methane emission in India was between 2-3 million tonnes per year," the minister explained.
A prestigious study on the Himalayan glaciers, led by Dr V.K. Raina, with the National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology, had extensively documented the contrasting ways in which glaciers have behaved during the last 100 years.
