Showing posts with label IPCC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IPCC. Show all posts

Friday, August 10, 2012

Having made to beat a hasty retreat on its stand on ‘retreating glaciers’, the IPCC might have lost more than just credibility!

The IPCC has come under flak on three counts, the first of which is that due diligence was not followed and the claims were not peer-reviewed. Secondly, for the misleading authoritative tone in its predictions of the future, and lastly, for merely being the words of authors who are no experts… and this after Mr. Pachauri claimed that “IPCC procedures were robust and the world should have no doubt about the reality of climate change,” just a few days before leaving for Copenhagen. “The UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, is now doomed. Not a word it or its Chairman says can any longer be taken seriously. The news that it is at last abandoning its entirely false claim that the glaciers of the Himalayas will disappear entirely by 2035 is one of the last nails in the coffin of this unlamented corpse,” cries Monkton.

While it might be too early to deny the reality of climate change and global warming, the recent spate of errors does not augur well for environmentalists battling to save an already over-burdened Earth. Besides, with a skeleton falling out of the IPCC closet every few days, one only wonders how many more are to follow. With climate change sceptics scoring points over ‘believers’ with such inconvenient frequency, the IPCC has some serious questions to answer, something it has so far failed to do convincingly...

Agreed, action has to come thick and fast if the humans are causing or accelerating climate change, but passing off unverified reports as gospel truth is an unpardonable act especially given the vast economic disparity faced by the world. Clearly, catastrophic predictions and prophesies emanating from half-baked truths can have far greater repercussions…


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Thursday, August 9, 2012

A death trap in the making

Global warming may not leave people with many options

This was the decade of global warming. While the Copenhagen summit 2009 has been deemed a failure, it has definitely given the issue a global platform, more so when seen in light of the recent criticism of global warming data – detractors have accused that results have been manipulated to support warming theorists.

Irrespective of that, the impact of global warming and climate change is gruesome. Sea level is rising by around 0.2 cm a year. Horrifyingly, a 1m rise would affect 6 million people in Egypt; with 12% to 15% of agricultural land lost, 13 million in Bangladesh with 16% of national rice production lost and 72 million in China and “tens of thousands” of hectares of agricultural land, according to Nicholls and Leatherman. From 1961 to 2003, the global ocean temperature rose by 0.10 °C. More severe implications include transnational migration of epidemics like malaria, plague et al. In addition, economic cost can be easily gauged from the example of the 1926 Miami hurricane, which cost $157 billion. What is more appalling is that around 25 million people are estimated to have been displaced in the 1990s due to environmental changes and shockingly, the number is estimated to reach 150 million by the end of 2050 as per the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). More grievously, 150,000 are estimated to die every year due to climate change, as per data by the World Health Organization.

And while the implications of global warming are far more than we can gauge, over 70% of the world population is unaware of the issue.


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