Go IPCC!!
Yes, I am back from a hiatus. Only if I were a bit more regular with my routine!:)
Anyway, I am quite piqued with the way the IPCC has been recently mocked by people from all across the climate change divide. These have surely been unfortunate times for the scientific body. From being held as the apostle of climate science, or any science for that matter, to being the whipping boy of all, the IPCC has come a long way! To provide a bit of perspective for my beloved readers, it all started with email hacking incident where researchers at the University of East Anglia were found to be using a "trick" in the famous "hockey-stick" graph of the global surface temperatures. That was pure bad timing, for it came right before the Copenhagen summit.
Then came the disturbing revelation that the prediction of Himalayan Glaciers completely melting by 2035 was not "pure science" but "gray science"; science that was not peer reviewed. The final "news" to come from the IPCC camp is that it published some reports on Netherlands that were by the national government of that country and not scientifically ascertained.
This has caused some interesting reactions to surface. Few of the climate change enthusiasts have been very quick to distance themselves from the body and the naysayers have got another chance to drive another stake in the concept of Global Climate Change. And mind you, this is a serious one for it exposes the very source of the issue. The reaction of the news media has especially been a treat to watch! Even more when the Northeastern United States was drowned in snow a few weeks ago.
My reaction to this would be three-fold. First, IPCC. There is no denying the mammoth efforts of this committee. No one incident or "gray" science can tarnish the broad message of this committee. The committee cited more than 10,000 peer reviewed literature to come up with its 3000 pages long report. Now, the sheer volume of this effort does not deem the work to be beyond question. The fact that non-peer reviewed work was allowed to be included in this body of work confuses me, but it should not take anything away from the sheer dedication of researchers working on it. And this is not even based on the perspective I have gained by working closely with one of the lead authors of the report for close to 18 months now. I cannot even begin to question his academic integrity just because a prediction made about Himalayan Glaciers was over-ambitious.
This brings us to the bigger question: What is Science? Is anything conclusively proven by science or is it as equivocal as religion or as subjective as philosophy. After all these years, have we even got a conclusive link between smoking and lung cancer? Have we found out the right dosage for any carcinogen for it to be lethal? Science is always uncertain and has probabilities attached to it, which makes it a very poor participant in the adversarial approach in policy making followed by governments globally. It can, in certain situations, provide only the right path to move on. In this way, the IPCC can be counted as a commendable path forward. Shaky at times, but commendable nonetheless.
Second, Climate Change. Nothing we might say against IPCC or nothing that we do to mock the concept of climate change will let us wish away the problem. The earth is warming, the climate is changing and closing our eyes to it will only hasten the inevitable, not get rid of the problem. Here, I would emphasize on the difference between weather and climate again. A lot of the news presenters gushingly proclaimed the demise of climate change as a result of the severe snowstorms in this part of the world lately. That, my dear friends, is the weather part of it. The daily, seasonal or annual variation is weather. Climate is something that cannot be seen by the naked eye and can be measured only over longer time horizons. And the news here is grim! Arctic ice caps are shrinking rapidly, in 2007 they were 50% of their strength in 1979, globally, this January was the second hottest January in the history of the 130 years of surface temperature measurement and the last 10 years have made up the hottest decade ever! I so wish we were talking about the population of the fairer sex here! Sadly, we are not:)
Finally, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri! Oh, how I wish some things about IPCC were different:) I have had the (dis)pleasure of engaging him in a conversation when he came for lecture at my undergrad institution, IIT Delhi, in a different capacity. Back then, I did not find him too happy with people having points of view which did not agree with his. He came across as a rash diplomat! How I wish I had given him the feedback back then!:P After all the diplomatic bungling, the Armani clad bugger goes out and writes a sleazy novel on a climate researcher, modeled on him, who goes around the world in search of hot bodies, not hot temperatures! And to top it all, he releases the book with the fanfare typically associated with a big Bollywood release in India, bang in the middle of all this controversy! WTF!!
In a nutshell, the Armani suits aside, we still trust the IPCC broadly, don't we?:)
