Days after the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change admitted to goofing up on Himalayan glaciers, it said
it was reviewing earlier finding blaming global warming for increase
in number of natural disasters such as floods and droughts.
In short: the panel could have got this wrong
too.
"We are reassessing the evidence and will
publish a report on natural disasters and extreme weather with the
latest findings," IPCC vice-chairperson Jean-Pascal van Ypersele told
a London weekly Sunday Times.
In another report, the same paper said
Pachauri's company Tata Energy and Resources Institute won grants
based on "bogus claims" about disappearing Himalayan Glaciers. The
IPCC's claim blaming global warming for natural disasters was based on
an unpublished report not subjected to scientific review, said the
paper.
And the authors withdrew the report saying the evidence was too weak.
But this was good enough for the panel, which is
headed by R.K. Pachauri. And if it was good enough for the IPCC, its
report published in 2007 was good enough for all world leaders who
accepted it as fact.
The severity of floods in Andhra Pradesh in
September 2009 and hurricane Katrina in the US were blamed on global
warming.
At the Copenhagen climate summit, the African
and other least developed nations sought US $ 100 billion dollars aid
by 2020 on the basis of the IPCC claim. Now, the IPCC is not so sure.
The paper, on which the IPCC had based its
claim, was finally published in 2008 with a caveat: "We find
insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between
global temperature increase and catastrophe losses." But the IPCC
neither issued a clarification nor modified its own report.
Sunday Times also said that at least two experts
who checked drafts of the IPCC report urged greater caution in
proposing a link between climate change and disaster impacts -- but
they were ignored.
The IPCC had last week expressed regrets for
claiming that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.
The bogus claim was based on a news article
published in a magazine in 1999. It was again without evidence, based
on a quote from a glaciologist who now works at a Delhi-based
non-profit organisation headed by Pachauri.
