Opinion Still heating up

Remember this: nobody really wants to act on climate change. It will cost money. It will cost political capital. It will require new regulations. None of these are welcome. So,of course,people will look for reasons not to act. And the easiest is to claim the “science is not conclusive”. But then,science never is,or it ceases to be science. Yet when there’s as much of a consensus in any field as there is in climate science,you’d better have a pretty good reason to ignore it.

Is one massively stupid error in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,or IPCC,enough? For those who want to throw stones at the gloomy prophets of doom,much less would have been enough. After all,the absurd little syllogism would run: something in the report is wrong. But then anything could be wrong. The scientists are lying to us! Now can we have our cheap petrol,please?

This tendency will be compounded by the silliness of the error itself. One scientist,in a phone interview with a journalist,may or may not have come up with an (absurdly close) date at which Himalayan glaciers vanish. That journalist writes a story,gets it published. The story gets noted in the IPCC report. And eventually people get round to noticing that Tibet definitely won’t be ice-free by 2035,and the stone-throwing sets in.

And it gets worse: that scientist now heads the team spending $500,000 to investigate vanishing Himalayan glaciers in TERI,the institute that IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri calls home.

But stories that imply corruption in climate science always run up against one big logical error. There’s simply so much more money in saying that things are OK as they are.

So,even if the date was ludicrous,the concern might not be. Are the Himalayan glaciers shrinking? Well,many are far enough above the zero-degree line that they’re relatively safe. But others aren’t. And there’s no scientific doubt that they are,indeed,losing increasing amounts of ice on average. (The scientist who publicised the error: “There is no room for reasonable doubt that glaciers in the Himalayas and Karakoram are losing mass.”) Where’s the debate? On whether that is happening faster in the Himalayas or at the same rate as in the Arctic — or New Zealand.

So let’s place the 2035 date in perspective as an error. It appeared only in the 1000-page full IPCC report in 2007; it was eliminated from the much smaller official briefs that were actually used to attempt to influence policy. Here’s the other thing that’s important to mention: the main movers in a (long-standing) attempt to fix the date are scientists who are in many cases major contributors to the IPCC reports. In August last year,for example,Al Gore advisor and glaciologist Richard Armstrong publicly told the Nepal government that the IPCC had incorporated “misleading quotes” on glaciers receding,that they weren’t sure how the quotes got in,and that

they would be taken out of the next report.

That being said,there’s no excuse for it being in the text at all. Science works like this,yes — something is published,it is reviewed,it is falsified,and we progress — but the IPCC report is not supposed to contribute to the scientific debate,but instead to summarise it,to collate already reviewed information. The IPCC,and Rajendra Pachauri,have a lot of explaining to do. Several big names in glacier science publicly attacked the Himalayas section last year,saying it contained a “catalogue of errors” because of insufficient due diligence. (These activist scientists out to mislead the world have pretty sneaky methods.)

And errors like this offer ammunition to those we don’t want too empowered.

One such person is Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh. The moment last year people started talking particularly loudly about the 2035 error,Ramesh happily added his voice to the chorus. Understandable,even perhaps laudable. But he,of course,overextended himself. Going a lot further than the error warranted,he announced that a one-man report (based on only two years of data) that his ministry released “proved” that not only was the projected date incorrect — but that climate change may not be affecting Himalayan glaciers at all. That spin,both unnecessary and unjustified,caused an avalanche of mockery to descend on India’s environment ministry,and severely hampered India’s credibility and perceptions of its seriousness heading into Copenhagen. (Chinese authorities,in contrast,accept that Tibet has shown particular vulnerability to warming.)

That lack of credibility attaches too,therefore,to Ramesh’s latest attack on the IPCC. The problem is that it is clear that the constituent governments of the IPCC should definitely ask for a review of what else got into the full review that was problematic — but asking in a way that actually questions the report’s methodology as a whole,as Ramesh did,lays one open to ridicule.

Climate change science is somewhere no science has been before. On the one hand,absolutely everybody with an interest in the status quo desperately wants it to be wrong. On the other,it simply can’t take ages to reach conclusions to be at all effective in framing policy.

So,here and there in a 1000-page report,someone will cut corners. And when errors are discovered,the deniers will explode in happy self-justification. Now,as ever,we need to ignore them.

There will be errors. It might even be the case that there is some groupthink,or that the occasional person is corrupt. But,because of these,not acting with urgency,the urgency that the entire scientific community is pleading with us to show? That is simply unconscionable.

mihir.sharma@expressindia.com