Sunday, February 7, 2010

India forms new climate change body

Headline from last Thursday's Telegraph in the UK. Here's an excerpt:

The Indian government has established its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group headed by its own leading scientist Dr R.K Pachauri...

[India's environment minister Mr Jairam Ramesh] announced the Indian government will establish a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world’s ‘third ice cap’, and an ‘Indian IPCC’ to use ‘climate science’ to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.

“There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn’t do the original research which is one of the weaknesses… they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.

“I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we have launched the Indian Network on Comprehensive Climate Change Assessment (INCCA),” he said.


India's voracious need for energy to fuel a rapidly growing and developing country makes it the perfect candidate to provide some much needed counterpoint to the entrenched, politicized views of the IPCC.


Life never stops being interesting!


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