V K Raina: The Man Who Came In From The Cold
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Image: Bob Strong/ Reuters
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R.K. Pachauri become a celebrity after IPCC won a Nobel, but is now facing a credibility crisis
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However simple this may sound, it makes a lot of difference to the authenticity of the data collected. By November, the first snowfall has already taken place because of which it is very difficult to identify the outline of the glaciers. That’s why many glaciers outlined in the maps show much larger outlines than actually present. So, when the SAC compared the current size of glaciers using satellite imagery with the 1962 maps they obviously found a lot of shrinkage. “We told the minister that we do not agree what SAC says. At least that is our experience of the glaciers we have gone to,” adds Raina.
Ramesh took notice and asked Raina if he would prepare a ‘white paper on the status of work done on Himalayan glaciers’. He was given a window of three weeks to complete the white paper. Raina claims he had no idea what a white paper meant. But he checked. “I found that a white paper means truthful expression of facts,” he says.
On August 4, 2009, Raina submitted his report. It contained 150 years of data collected by the GSI of 25 Indian glaciers. It said that the Himalayan glaciers and glaciers in the rest of the world have retreated and advanced irregularly with no direct link to warming or cooling of the earth’s climate. “This is one of the many issues of climate change science that we do not fully understand,” says Dr. Madhav L. Khandekar, a scientist based out of Canada who has been an expert reviewer of the 2007 IPCC report.
On November 9, 2009, Jairam Ramesh released the Himalayan glacier document at a press conference in New Delhi. “There is no conclusive scientific evidence to link global warming with what is happening with the Himalayan glaciers,” he said.
Hell Breaks Loose
Raina vividly remembers the day the report was released. “It is surprising that even on the day when this document was released by the minister, a lot of press asked me questions but nobody bothered to put them in the papers because probably at that time they thought this fellow knows nothing… yeh to mantriji ne kar diya,” he says. He was partially correct. Not many took the statement too seriously in the beginning, except for some stray critics writing in the media. But the one man who took immediate note of it and reacted bitterly was R. K. Pachauri, chairman of IPCC.
Pachauri came down strongly on the report. The following day, in an interview with The Guardian newspaper, he questioned the minister’s intentions behind releasing such a report terming it as ‘an extremely arrogant statement’. And he didn’t refrain from taking pot shots at Raina either. “With the greatest of respect, this guy retired years ago and I find it totally baffling that he comes out and throws out everything that has been established years ago.” He went on to say that such claims were those of “climate change deniers and school boy science.” Scientists across the world and six of them who shared their perspective on this issue with Forbes India say that Pachauri’s comments were out of order because they were very personal.
In December, 2009, however, Dr. Murari Lal, a scientist and one of the authors of the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC 4th Assessment Report spilled the beans at a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) conference held in New Delhi at the headquarters of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). He said that he had cited the ‘Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035’ claim from a 2005 World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report.
The implication of this “confession” was serious. Lal was saying his data was from a secondary source. The events quickly unravelled. WWF quickly responded and said it had, in turn, take the information from a quote in the New Science Journal given by Dr. Syed Iqbal Hasnain, who was then at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and who later became the head of glaciology at TERI. Hasnain, on his part, denied making any such statement. The source of the claim in IPCC’s report thus entered a blackhole.
The moment this story made headlines, scientists and policy makers across the world started questioning IPCC’s credibility. Dr. Vincent Gray, a scientist based out of New Zealand who has been an expert reviewer on all IPCC reports ,puts IPCC’s current state of affairs in perspective. “This Himalayan story is so obviously fraudulent that it is surprising that people have only just noticed it. I blame myself that I should have noticed it long ago,” says Gray. But, quite a few people including the IPCC believe that the ‘error’ is not such a big deal. Mark Kenber, Policy Director at The Climate Group, is one such person. “The IPCC does not claim anything with 100 percent certainty. Clearly there hasn’t been sufficient scrutiny of all work covered, but that only two pieces out of tens of thousands have slipped through is remarkable,” says Kenber.
However, others like Bjorn Lomborg, author of the book The Skeptical Environmentalist believe that over the years IPCC had assumed the status of almost a god-like organisation. “People thought that if it is in the IPCC, it is true. The guys were very sure about themselves. All three reports of the IPCC would do a lot of good with more transparency,” says Lomborg.
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