Himalayan Times: Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has urged all not to fret over his erroneous forecast that all glaciers in the Himalayan region will disappear by 2035. Pachauri’s forecast on the glacial retreat, part of IPCC’s fourth assessment report of the institution published in 2007 and submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), had received a storm of criticism from the scientific community.
“Thousands of documents were submitted to the IPCC then. The inclusion of the glacial melting issue in the report was a sort of human error,” Pachauri told reporters in Kathmandu. Pachauri is here to participate in the Green Economy Conference organised by International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development and United Nations Environment Programme.
“We have to make fundamental changes in our activities if we really want to save the earth. There is no need to wait for science to act on reducing the impact of climate change as its effect has already been noticed on various parts of the earth,” said the IPCC chairman. Pachauri, an Indian national, had received the Nobel Prize as chairman of IPCC along with the former US vice-president Al Gore in 2007 for their effort to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about manmade climate change and to lay the foundations for the measures to counteract the climate change.
“There is a need to carry out researches and work to reduce the impacts of climate change on the Himalaya region,” said the IPCP chairman. At a time when the IPCC is preparing its fifth assessment report, Pachauri assured that similar mistakes will not figure in the new report. “We have a rigorous review process of scientific documents for which 831 scientists have been selected from among 3,000 nominations.
They have been working to finalise the global report on climate change,” Pachauri said.
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