Presentations March 6, 2010
National Research Conference on Climate Change
National Research Conference on Climate Change
Date: March 5 and 6, 2010 CALL FOR ABSTRACTS Last date extended to: February 15, 2010 Acceptance notification: February 20, 2010 Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD), Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM), and the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) are organizing a National Research Conference on Climate Change to be held at IITD Download pdf
The Copenhagen Accord is weak, meaningless and fundamentally flawed. It will be bad for the fight against climate change and bad for India.
Unable to agree on targets and funding, world leaders settled for an interim political deal. But the Copenhagen Accord could change the rules of the game by wiping equity off the agenda. Read the full story...
As Copenhagen nears, Obama’s America sees new hope: Yes, we can...dump climate multilateralism. In Bangkok, most developed countries joined the charge. Their methods: jettison equity, peddle domestic actions and dangle carrots to break developing country unity. Some, like India, show signs of wavering. Kushal Pal Singh Yadav tracks negotiations in Bangkok. Read the full story...
CSE Letter to MoEF Read more...
Visiting the US, one thing came home to me: the country has very little political will to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Policy makers and media professionals talk about the climate change crisis. But any opinion on cutting emissions, based on historical or even current responsibility, is just dismissed. The public perception, seemingly carefully nurtured, is it is runaway pollution in China and India that will devastate the world. Indeed, talk about serious action by the US is hushed up, for it will play into the hands of the Republicans.
The recent controversy on the IPCC report regarding Himalayan glaciers has been all over the media. Before dwelling on this matter further, it is important to recognize that it was a silly mistake on the part of the authors of the IPCC report (those who wrote and reviewed Chapter 10 of the Working Group II: Impacts, adaptation and vulnerabilities), to pick up a non-peer reviewed paper and quote it as a definitive finding. Silly still, they quoted a definitive year – 2035 – for the vanishing of the entire Himalayan glaciers.
Somebody recently asked me why India supported the Copenhagen Accord. It is correct to say that the proposed accord has no meaningful targets for emission reduction from Annex 1 (industrialized countries). Global emissions will increase or reduce at best marginally.
Let me be straight: As the clock ticks to Copenhagen, how low is the world prepared to prostrate to get climate-renegade US on board? Is a bad deal in Copenhagen better than no deal?
Just imagine: floods in dry Rajasthan; drought in wet Assam. In both cases, devastation has been deadly, with people struggling to cope. But are these natural disasters or human-made disasters signs of change of the world’s climate systems? Or are these simply the result of mismanagement so that people already living on the edge of survival, cannot cope with any variations — small or big — in weather events?
Last fortnight I wrote about making space for emissions. Let’s discuss how this can be done. Let’s discuss this with governments meeting, possibly for the millionth time, to discuss the global agreement to combat climate change. Let’s discuss this when we know with some greater certainty that global warming is beginning to adversely change our world. And we know that in spite of all the years of intense negotiations, governments have done too little to avert the reality of climate change.
Now that the jury is out on the very real threat of climate change, we must focus on what needs to be done. The recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc) should make climate-sceptics like us president George Bush blush.
My worst fears are coming true; and that has more to do with the politics of climate change than its reality. While concern on global warming reaches a crescendo, the world, instead of finding resolutions, is hurtling towards discord and dispute. Let us be clear: we do not have time to waste on bad politics and bad politicians.
Will Indian scientists measure up to the challenge of climate change? I ask this question because of the nature of the science as well as the nature of our scientists.