February 26, 2010 Frontline Column: Beyond the Obvious




by Praful Bidwai





Barring a minuscule proportion, those who have even skimmed through parts of the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report (FAR)—such as the Synthesis Report for policy-makers, the detailed reports of the three Working Groups, or summaries for the media—will not fail to be impressed by its overwhelmingly sober and cautious tone, tendency to understate some aspects of the climate crisis, and the careful differentiation it makes between varying emissions scenarios and degrees of likelihood of global warming exceeding a certain level.




These degrees are defined with mathematical precision: “likely” means a probability of over 66 percent; “very likely” over 90 percent; “virtually certain” 99 percent-plus; and “very unlikely” under 10 percent. The 2° C limit for global warming beyond which the IPCC says climate change could become irreversible or dangerous is also probabilistically linked to certain atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.




This is in keeping with the probabilistic notion of scientific truth, as opposed to absolute certainty. Good, responsible science respects and welcomes scepticism and is always aware of its limitations, including the possibility that its conclusions may be falsified, and that its methods are amenable to refinement. The 4,000 scientists drawn from scores of countries who wrote the FAR were tasked to rely on solidly established science, cross-check each major inference or forecast, and back up each number or statement with citations from standard, professionally peer-reviewed science journals.




So it is indeed disturbing that some inaccuracies and exaggerations crept into the Working Groups’ reports, which form the basis of the expert assessments cited in climate change negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The climate change-denial lobby has used these to launch a full-scale assault on the IPCC, questioning its integrity and demanding the resignation of its chairman RK Pachauri, who also heads The Energy and Resources Institute. The lobby—in which 770 companies have come together to hire over 2,300 agents in Washington alone, in addition to hundreds of supporters in polluting corporations, powerful think-tanks and the media—is targeting climate science itself. Some British newspapers have also accused Pachauri of abusing his position to secure favours for himself and TERI.




It is vital to make a clear demarcation between the individual-centred accusations (on which more below) and the claimed flaws in the FAR. The latter include a statement in the Working Group-2 report that Himalayan glaciers “are receding faster than in any other part of the world, and if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 … is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 sq km by … 2035.”




There are also accusations that the FAR linked recent natural disasters, including hurricanes, floods and heat waves, to long-term climate processes, based on an as-yet-unpublished paper which has since been revised. Another charge is that the IPCC’s assessment of reduced ice in the Andes and the Alps was based not on a peer-reviewed journal, but on anecdotal accounts in a magazine for mountaineers, and on a Swiss postgraduate student’s dissertation. Yet another accusation relates to rapid forest loss in the Amazon. Earlier, the climate change-deniers’ lobby hacked into the personal emails of researchers at Britain’s East Anglia University, and claimed that that they deliberately manipulated or suppressed data to suit predetermined conclusions about accelerated climate change.




Of all these charges, the first is the most important and best-documented, and prompted the IPCC to express “regret”. The other accusations appear weakly substantiated or based on certain interpretations (e.g. of the colloquial term “fix” in the hacked emails, which may mean accommodating observed differences, not manipulating data). The statement about the glaciers disappearing by 2035 was not based on a reference in a peer-reviewed journal, but on a report by the advocacy group WWF. This in turn was based on a 1999 report in the British popular science magazine New Scientist, which quoted Syed Iqbal Hasnain, an Indian glaciologist, then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and now with TERI.




However, Hasnain denies having told the New Scientist reporter that the glaciers are likely to vanish by a specific year, only that they are receding rapidly. Matters are complicated by the fact that Hasnain did not contradict the report until recently and cited it without quoting himself in some of his recent presentations. He says that predicting a year by which the glaciers will disappear is “speculation”. Hasnain, who has published some 30 scientific papers, has been chairman of the Working Group on Himalayan Glaciology of the International Commission for Snow and Ice (ICSI). But the ICSI’s report, published in 1999, said nothing about Himalayan glaciers.




It turns out that the source of the “speculation” was a 1996 report by Russian scientist VM Kotlyakov, which said Himalayan glaciers are likely to disappear by 2350. The figure was transposed as 2035. The IPCC got it wrong by 300 years and did not bother to check its source. It also allowed another major error to creep in: a gross inflation of the area of the Himalayan glaciers—500,000 sq km, 16 times higher than the normally accepted figure.




These inaccuracies are egregious and unbecoming of good science based on robust facts and observations. They must not be minimised, as Pachauri tried to do when he claimed on January 23 that the IPCC’s retraction has “strengthened” its credibility. This claim is patently untenable. It also turns out that Pachauri was wrong in telling The Times  (London) on January 22: “I became aware of the 2035 error when it was reported in the media about ten days ago. Before that, it was really not made known …” But emails on this issue have been circulating since early December.




Pallava Bagla, a correspondent of the journal Science, says he had asked Pachauri about the 2035 claim last November, weeks before the Copenhagen conference began. He was told: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.” But last week, Bagla asked Pachauri: “I pointed it out the error to you in several e-mails, several discussions, yet you decided to overlook it. Was that so that you did not want to destabilise what was happening in Copenhagen?”




Pachauri answered: “Not at all …. As it happens, we were all terribly preoccupied with a lot of events. We were working round the clock with several things that had to be done in Copenhagen. It was only when the story broke, I think in December, we decided to, well, early this month—as a matter of fact, I can give you the exact dates—early in January that we decided to go into it …. And within three or four days, we were able to come up with a clear and a very honest and objective assessment ….”




However, none of this detracts from the soundness of the assessment that the Himalayan glaciers are melting rapidly. This assessment is not based a few studies, but on numerous independent lines of evidence established by scores of scientists in India, China, Nepal, the U.S., Germany, and elsewhere. A single slip of this kind cannot demolish a whole body of scientific knowledge which has emerged after a quarter-century of serious international effort at understanding the impact of human activity on the climate system.




Yet, scientists do not know nearly enough about the Himalayan glaciers’ behaviour to say how rapidly they will retreat or disappear. The Himalayas are not as well-studied or -photographed as, say, the Alps. Scientists use various methods to study glacier behaviour—visual imagery, remote-sensing, measurement of glacier length, snout positions and discharge volumes, and changes in mass.




Mass balance, measured by new in situ techniques, is the most reliable indicator. But very few Himalayan sites have been studied for mass balance loss. So scientists cannot predict the precise behaviour of even some of the Himalayas’ 12,000-15,000 glaciers. Their disappearance by 2035, says an international group of glaciologists, would require “a 25-fold greater loss rate from 1999 to 2035 than that estimated for 1960 to 1999”.




However, there is compelling evidence that glaciers in the entire Greater Himalayas, stretching from the Hindu Kush to the Central and Eastern Himalayas to the Tibetan Plateau, barring the Karakoram range, are shrinking at historically high rates. Studies published in peer-reviewed journals document a significant loss of glacier area, mass balance and length since the 1960s. For instance, a study of 1,317 glaciers in 11 different places documents a 16 percent area loss since 1962.




Another study, which looks at important glaciers like Pindari, Gangotri, Parbati, Dokriani, Sara Umanga, Chandra and Bhaga, finds retraction by 5 to 49 metres since observations began. The average annual loss of area between 1962 and 2001/2 was 0.39 percent. Similarly, mass balance studies show a high loss of volume, decreasing depth, fragmentation and accelerating recession. Report after annual report of the World Glacier Monitoring Service confirms this.




Glaciers are shrinking the world over. As they shrink, black rock is exposed. This reflects back only 5 percent of sunlight, compared to 80 percent for snow/ice. This accelerates melting, in turn leading to greater warming. This iterative process is called “positive feedback” and is similar to what is happening to the polar ice-sheets.




There is one significant difference, however, as regards the Himalayas. That is the effect of Black Carbon or soot generated from the incomplete combustion of diesel, coal and biomass. Black Carbon, according to one estimate, accounts for one-third to one-half of Himalayan glacier recession. In South Asia, cookstoves burning fuelwood, twigs, vegetable residues and cowdung are a major Black Carbon source, and cause respiratory problems among women who use primitive chulhas in unventilated kitchens. Such indoor pollution is estimated to kill 400,000 annually.




Critically relevant and material here are the likely consequences of Himalayan glacier melting. The Himalayas are rightly called the world’s Third Pole and Asia’s Water Tower. They feed seven great river systems, including the Ganga, Indus, Brahmaputra, Yangtze and Mekong, on which some 1.3 billion people depend. Rapid glacier melting will have a horrifying impact on water availability, threatening millions of livelihoods, especially of the poor.




We must act urgently to prevent Himalayan glacier retreat. One site of action is cookstoves. Four-fifths of India’s rural households are compelled to use biomass-based cookstoves with a thermal efficiency of 1-2 percent because they are poor and have no access to clean fuel like liquefied petroleum gas. There is an imperative need to help them shift to efficient cookstoves burning LPG—by redeploying the existing subsidy on kerosene (Rs 30,000 crores). Simultaneously, kerosene, largely burnt as lighting fuel, must be replaced by solar home-lighting, which is cheaper than extending the electricity grid to India’s one-lakh-plus unelectrified villages (of a total of 6 lakhs).




The IPCC failed to apply well-established procedures and its own standards, including “thorough review of the quality and validity of each source” cited in its report. It must rectify the error by revisiting the Himalayan glacier issue. But it would best restore its credibility by appointing a special commission to cross-check and verify all the references in its reports, which identifies citations not based on robust facts. This will have a salutary impact on the UNFCCC climate negotiations.




As for Pachauri, he faces several conflict-of-interest allegations. TERI allegedly received Rs 56 lakhs from India’s Ministry for Environment and Forests (MoEF) for conducting IPCC meetings between 2004 and 2006. TERI has also reportedly received tens of thousands of dollars from corporations like Toyota Motor Company or businesses involved in emissions trading (Deutsche Bank). Pachauri also holds posts in interested parties like Carbon Exchange and the Pegasus Fund. Pachauri does not hide his corporate connections. His just-published novel was released in Mumbai by Mukesh Ambani in the presence of other industrialists and bankers.




This does not necessarily suggest that TERI’s work or IPCC’s integrity was compromised. But it warrants full disclosure of the details of the grants and fees TERI received from different sources—in the interest of transparency and the spirit of science, which the IPCC is meant to uphold. To demand this is not to allege, as environment minister Jairam Ramesh did, that the IPCC is “alarmist” and that his own position that the Himalayan glaciers present a “mixed” picture—both retreat and advance—stands vindicated. Even less does it justify the paranoid charge that the IPCC or Western powers indulged in “India-bashing” to extract major concessions at from it the climate talks.




The official Indian position on Himalayan glaciers has oscillated between outright denial and agnosticism. This is reflected in geologist VK Raina’s discussion paper put on the MoEF website, which is neither peer-reviewed nor well-referenced and credible. Climate change denial is irrational and dangerous. Indian leaders are right to deplore it in the West. But they should stop practising their own form of semi-denial on the Himalayan issue and move quickly towards remedial action on Black Carbon, and on mitigation of and adaptation to changes in the Himalayan ecosystem. It is in too precarious a state to be ignored.