Indian climatologist responds to the Telegraph article
Last weekend, London’s Sunday Mail quoted the lead author of a chapter in a purportedly authoritative 2007 climate-change assessment as saying that he deliberately used unsubstantiated sources for conclusions about the rate of glacier melting in the Himalayas. After two days, I finally reached the scientist in question — Murari Lal — in Ghaziabad, India, where he chairs the Climate, Energy and Sustainable Development Analysis Centre. Lal doesn’t dispute that mistakes were made in the inclusion of some numbers in his chapter of the report — ones that likely exaggerated projections of glacier melting. But he strenuously challenges the newspaper’s charge that those mistakes were politically motivated.
In that newspaper story, the Mail’s David Rose quoted Lal as saying about the Himalayan glacier melt projection: “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”
But Lal counters that he never said that. He’s not saying he was quoted out of context. He flatly denies ever uttering those words. He similarly denies several of the other quotes attributed to him in that article. And he points out that the newspaper misidentified his field of study as glaciology. He is, in fact, a climatologist.The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which issued the report in which the disputed Himalayan glacier data appeared, has called the use of a non-peer-reviewed source — in this case a report by the World Wildlife Fund — a mistake.
I asked Lal how he happened to rely on that WWF material.
None of the IPCC chapter’s authors were glaciologists, he said, so “we entirely trusted the findings reported in the WWF 2005 Report and the underlying references as scientifically sound and relevant in the context of climate change impacts in the region.” Those underlying references, he says, cited projections by a renowned Indian glaciologist. So Lal says his team deferred to what appeared to be that scientist’s assessments (projections that have apparently since been retracted).
“As authors,” he says, “we had to report only the best available science inclusive of a select few (non-peer-reviewed sources) which is ‘policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral’ — and that’s what we collectively did while writing the Asia Chapter.”
Keep in mind, Lal argues, the 2035 figure contained in his chapter — as a date at which Himalayan glaciers might disappear — was not a prediction, but a projection. IPCC authors are prohibited from making their own predictions, he said. And, he argues, his team didn’t. Indeed, he maintains, “We did not violate the existing IPCC procedures in any manner.”
So, what is his current assessment of the Himalayan melt situation? …
