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February 9, 2010
India walks away from IPCC and its report
As of one the world's big economic players, India has walked away from the IPCC, stating that the panel is unreliable, putting economist Dr R.K Pachauri, who chairs the UN"s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is in direct conflict with his own government in India.
...false claims have heightened tensions between Dr Pachauri and the government, which had earlier questioned his glacial melting claims. In Autumn, its environment minister Mr Jairam Ramesh said while glacial melting in the Himalayas was a real concern, there was evidence that some were actually advancing despite global warming.
Dr Pachauri had dismissed challenges like these as based on "voodoo science", but last night Mr Ramesh effectively marginalized the IPC chairman even further.
He announced the Indian government will established a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world's ‘third ice cap', and an ‘Indian IPCC' to use ‘climate science' to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.
"There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn't do the original research which is one of the weaknesses... they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.
India's environment minister is obviously being diplomatic. He points out ‘weaknesses' which are serious flaws inserted into a document, which is to have worldwide and destructive economic ramifications. With over a billion citizens and an economic growth of 6.1% in 2009, India has a good reason to turns its back on the defective Noble prize winning report.
The India government has gone so far as to found its own monitoring body, which Mr Ramesh said:
... will not rival the UN's panel, will publish its own climate assessment in November this year, with reports on the Himalayas, India's long coastline, the Western Ghat highlands and the north-eastern region close to the borders with Bangladesh, Burma, China and Nepal. "Through these we will demonstrate our commitment to climate science," he said.
When dealing with India's climatic well-being, that nation has decided that it is best serviced by performing its own observation and research. The rational being "India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC."
To put it more succinctly, the UN's IPCC can't take care of the needs of India, let alone the whole world, and since that is the care, and a very reasonable one, watch for other economically dynamic nations to decided to ‘take a walk.'