The Melting Truth about Climate Change

Open magazine, 21 January, 2010

You read it here first. Six weeks before evidence from a new study busted the claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, Open had set the record straight. It has now been accepted that the claim made by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is untrue. Which is what Jay Mazoomdaar had argued in our cover story on climate change in Open’s issue dated 4 December.

The 2035 date, it appears, was picked up by the IPCC from a report in the New Scientist. And this report itself was based on a ‘speculative’ estimate by Syed Iqbal Hasnain, then a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Hasnain is now an academic with The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), headed by IPCC chief RK Pachauri.

In A Climate of Chaos (see next post), Open had made its case against the projection thus:

‘The recent report on Himalayan glaciers by Dr VK Raina, a former deputy director general of the Geological Survey of India… said that the Gangotri glacier had been retreating rapidly at about 20 m per year until 2000, but has since slowed down considerably, and practically remained standstill since September 2007… In a paper published in Current Science last year, Dr Sharad Jain, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, pointed out that even if the annual recession rate of the Gangotri glacier reaches 40 m—which is double the current rate—a glacier that measures 30 km in length will take about 700 years to melt away.’

And 2035 is hardly the only problem with the IPCC report. For instance, it is now clear that the report, as originally claimed, was not ‘peer-reviewed’. The report said that Arctic temperatures would rise twice as fast as global temperatures over the next 100 years. But it overlooks the fact that the Arctic was actually 1-2 degrees warmer than the present temperature in the 1930s. The report points out that the proportion of tropical cyclones that are high-intensity storms has increased in the last three decades, but does not mention that the total number of intense tropical cyclones has fallen sharply during the period. About small islands like the Maldives being vulnerable to sea-level rise, well, not if they’re made of coral, which is more than capable of outgrowing any sea-level rise. Besides, sea level in the Maldives is no higher now than it was 1,250 years ago. We could go on. Perhaps in a later issue…