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Man-Made Global Warming SATURDAY 30 JANUARY 2010 STAY UPDATED THROUGH THE DAY Business Standard NEW DELHI OPINION Visit www.business-standard.com 13 BusinessStandard VOLUME XVI NUMBER 136 MAN-MADE GLOBAL WARMING Playing with fire The climate-change ‘science’ continues to unravel, says DEEPAK LAL ILLUSTRATION BY BINAY SINHA t has been a bad two months for the der YS Rajasekhar Reddy got sup- A LONG, FAST DECLINE: 7 YEARS’ GLOBAL WEEKEND port from the Maoists during the purveyors of the “science” of man- COOLING AT 3.6°F (2°C)/CENTURY state elections, support that helped made global warming. The BA- °C RUMINATIONS SIC group of countries (Brazil, South 0.8 Global monthly temperature anomalies, January 2002 unseat the Telugu Desam. Like Africa, India and China) stood firm 0.7 to Feb ‘09; IPCC predicts warming at +2.4, +3, +3.9, +4.7, +5.3°C/century IPCC TN NINAN Mr Soren today, Mr Reddy at the Iat Copenhagen from being bounced in- 0.6 0.5 time began with a soft approach to an agreement on mandatory carbon 0.4 ne of the strengths of the In- to the Maoists, and got tough on- emission cuts. With the Democrat’s de- 0.3 dian system is its ability to ly after a year or two had passed. feat in Massachusetts, there is little hope 0.2 co-opt rebellious and sepa- The question that bears ask- of President Barack Obama pursuing the 0.1 O US climate change Bill, leaving Europe 0 ratist forces and bring them into the ing is whether the Maoists have got 2003 2005 2007 2009 — particularly the UK — out on a limb Figure 1: How the IPCC’s projections of rising temperatures have increasingly political mainstream. The Com- so much purchase in select pock- diverged since 2001 from the trend in actual temperatures. with their legislation of targets for sav- Source: Science and Public Policy Institute. munists were persuaded to take part ets of the country that they are now age CO2 emission cuts which, if imple- in the parliamentary system of democ- able to influence the outcome of CLIMATE CHANGE OVER THE PAST 1,000 YEARS THE HOCKEY STICK GRAPH AS SHOWN mented, will lead to their rapid descent AS SHOWN BY THE IPCC IN 1990 BY THE IPCC IN 2001 racy, and the separatist forces in Tamil state elections, and thereby de- into the Stone Age. © IPCC (1990) Nadu and Mizoram became the main- termine who will become the chief But an equally important drama has NORTHERN HEMISPHERE 0.5 C) C) ° stream. The system is large and minister. If they have twice tried the been playing in New Delhi with Dr Ra- ° accommodative enough to make gambit and if it worked on both oc- jendra Pachauri, the head of the Inter- Little ice age 0 national Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), room for all comers — and more casions, in that they won a reprieve Medical would come into the mainstream from police action that helped them having to retract various purportedly “sci- warm period -0.5 entific” claims made in the panel’s 2007 change ( Temperature if it were not for the instigation and to catch their breath and re-group, report. The one which has rightly come to -1.0 Departures in temperature ( support that Pakistan and China pro- they will naturally conclude that the fore in India is Glaciergate, concern- from the 1961 to 1990 average vide for the recalcitrant elements. the gambit is worth trying again. ing the IPCC’s claim that the Himalayan 1000 AD1500 AD 1900 AD Year 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000 Figure 2: Climate change over the past 1,000 years: JT Houghton et. al, IPCC First Figure 3: The ‘hockey stick’ graph: Mann ME, et al (1999), northern hemisphere That said, a strange thing is hap- With West Bengal elections not far glaciers would melt by 2035. When the Assessment Report, 1990. temperatures during the last millennium: inferences, uncertainties and limitations pening when it comes to the Maoists, away, it is important to ask who us- government-sponsored report by eminent because the shoe seems to be on the es whom when the Maoists form Indian glaciologist Dr Vijaya Raina came other foot. In at least two states, it links with mainstream parties. out in November, saying that the IPCC’s collaboration with the met office’s Hadley the 2001 IPCC report. losing credibility”. (Wegman Report, 2006 claims were baseless and recklessly Centre after obtaining the agreement of Till two Canadians, statistician Stephen is available at gochttp://www.cimateau- is the Maoists who have used the The stand-out example of how alarmist, it was dismissed by Dr Pachau- other met offices around the world. McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick, dit.org/pdf/others/07142006_Weg- mainstream parties for their own things can go wrong is provided by ri, a railway engineer with a PhD in eco- The unwillingness to release the da- published an article showing that “there man_Report.pdf). ends, with the latter willing to play Punjab in the 1980s. It was initial- nomics, as being “arrogant” and “voodoo ta was for two reasons. First, since 1977 was an error in a routine calculation step… These revelations of the debauch- along in the hope of grabbing pow- ly the Congress that tried to upstage science”. Subsequently, he had to eat crow when sunspot activity has decreased that falsely identified a hockey stick shape ing of climate change “science” by the er. The latest example is Shibu Soren, the Akali Dal by setting up Jarnail as he and the IPCC had to admit that their as the Sun seems to have gone to sleep, as the dominant pattern in the data. The IPCC continue apace. As I write, there is who as the newly-elected chief min- Singh Bhindranwale. Later, Akali predictions about Himalayan glaciers were both terrestrial and more accurate satel- flawed computer program can even pull a report that the IPCC’s 2007 claim that ister of Jharkhand wants to go politicians developed links with the without scientific foundations. lite temperature readings show the Earth out spurious hockey stick shapes from global warming is linked to a rise in nat- soft on the Maoists and has, in fact, militants and saw them as a use- Glaciergate had been preceded by Cli- is cooling, even as CO2 emissions have lists of trendless random numbers” (En- ural disasters has also been shown to be mategate in November, when a hacker increased (See fig. 1), contradicting ergy and Environment, 2003:752-771). scientifically invalid. The IPCC vice-chair- called off police action soon after ful ally for specific objectives — and leaked hundreds of emails from the the man-made global warming theory. With the subsequent furore, the US man says it will be reviewed. assuming office. Whether he has there too, it was not clear who was Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the Uni- Second, they have been keen to resur- Congress set up two scientific commit- The unravelling of this politicised cli- changed course after his meeting a using whom. What the country versity of East Anglia. These show that rect the infamous “hockey stick”. tees to examine climate history. They up- mate “science” has already had political couple of days ago with the home remembers is that Punjab came Professor Phillip Jones, the director of held McIntyre and McKitrick, and one consequences. At the recent BASIC en- minister remains to be seen, but it to the brink, and peace returned on- the CRU — the source of the most im- ill 1999, when a recent physics Phd- investigation chaired by Dr Edward Weg- vironmental ministers gathering, Xi Zhen- is hard to ignore the possibility that ly after a heavy price had been paid, portant of the four sets of temperature Tturned-climatologist, Michael Mann, man — a leading statistician — excori- hua, the Chinese representative, said that Mr Soren is delivering in return for in terms of bloodshed and violence, data on which the IPCC relies — along published a paper on the 1,000-year tem- ated the Mann papers as well as his var- Beijing would keep an “open attitude the support that he got from the including Operation Bluestar and with a tight network of colleagues had perature record, the accepted trend was ious highly placed supporters who had to the disputes in the scientific com- for years discussed various tactics to avoid given by fig. 2, which appeared in the 1990 tried to whitewash them. Wegman also munity” as “there is a view that climate Maoists during the recent elections the assassination of Indira Gandhi. releasing their data to outsiders under IPCC report (reproduced in its Chairman commissioned a “social network analy- change is caused by cyclical trends in na- to the state assembly. Because the Maoists speak in freedom of information laws. They kept John Houghton’s book Global Warm- sis” of Mann’s defenders to find out how ture itself”. As a start, to help in an In neighbouring West Bengal, the name of the poor, they tend coming up with innumerable excuses to ing (1994)). This shows that temperatures independent they were, which found that honest resolution of these disputes, the the Marxists continually beat the to attract some degree of sympa- conceal the background data on which in the Medieval Warm Period had been they “are closely connected and thus ‘in- IPCC needs to be disbanded. If neces- drum about Mamata Banerjee’s Tri- thy and so a political party doing their findings and temperature records higher than those predicted to increase dependent studies’ may not be as inde- sary, by the BASIC countries withdraw- namool Congress being in league a quick-and-dirty deal with them are based.
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