The Hindu Business Line : Too much heat over climate estimate

Some TV channels in India, through their news programmes and talk shows, have been subjecting, Dr R. K. Pachauri, Chairperson of the Inter-Government Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to a vitriolic diatribe, akin to verbal lynching. They are basing their intemperate broadsides on some vituperative articles in the UK media, especially The Telegraph and The Times, and thereby playing into their hands.

Not stopping with castigating him personally for the inclusion of certain statements which they hold to be tendentious, unverified and exaggerated in the Panel's assessment reports on the effects of global warming, they have cast doubts on his integrity by asseverating in so many words that he entered into “business deals “and “established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC's policy recommendations.”

Assessments and scenarios

They are taking umbrage essentially at two contingencies considered possible by the assessment reports relating to Himalayan glaciers and Amazon forests.

As regards the former, the 2007 report by the IPCC had talked of the probability of glaciers in the Himalayas “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high” and on the latter, the report had stated that “even a slight reduction in precipitation” due to climate change could cause a ‘huge depletion' of the Amazon forests. The best that the IPCC reports can do is to arrive at assessments and scenarios on a preponderance of probabilities. In the very nature of things, a highly complex futurist phenomenon like climate change does not lend itself to conclusive, verifiable scientific evidence, and anyone who demands it or claims to have it can only be playing a mug's game. Any dates given only indicate a range and none but an ignoramus would take it as an infallible pronouncement.

Further, reports of such panels are invariably approved by the general body of members before release. Hence, it will be unfair to blame the Chairperson alone for any observations that go against somebody's grain.

My experience as chairperson of two UN panels and a leader of India's delegation at a 53-week-long negotiations in the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development at Geneva leads me to wonder whether the media attacks on Dr Pachauri launched by the UK media, and transplanted wholesale in their programmes by Indian TV channels, are themselves part of the tactics of vested interests in developed countries to get rid of someone who is proving to be a thorn in their flesh.

Let us not forget that Dr Pachauri has been waging a relentless campaign fixing the primary responsibility on the developed countries, as the biggest polluters, to arrest further deterioration in the emission levels of greenhouse gases and arguing for massive funding of developing countries to ward off threats to their environment brought about by climate change. On both counts, Dr Pachauri could not but be anathema in the eyes of the West; in such circumstances, it is not above giving vent to its supremacist streak as also its propensity to give the dog a bad name for hanging it.

I have known several instances of Western representatives putting pressure on national governments to recall country delegates who refuse to toe their line and take an independent stand.

The pity is that India's Environment Minister, Mr Jairam Ramesh, should be ignorant of such machinations and join in the witch-hunt against Dr Pachauri for ‘creating a scare without conclusive scientific evidence'. It is time he and our media got wise to the wily ways of the West and not swallow the bait line, hook and rod.

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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