Cement, Energy and Environment

uncertainties in monsoon projections over the South Asian region. "The 4x4 assessment and the regional assessment will be provided to IPCC as part of the IPCC's 5 1 h Assessment Report (AR5)," said Mr. Jairam Ramesh, Union Minister of State for Environment and Forests. Both these initiatives will help fill an important scientific knowledge gap in the IPCC assessment by providing robust information at the sub-regional level, Mr. Ramesh said. This is the first time that India will be providing inputs to IPCC, he added. Courtesy: The Hindu Business Line, February 5, 2010. P11. TOP SCIENTISTS TO REVIEW IPCC'S PAPERS On UN Request, Global Body To Monitor Climate Panel's Work After Row Over Cut-Paste Report United Nations: At a tumultuous in UN-Ied climate negotiations, one of the world's most credible scientific groups agreed on 10.3.2010 to plug the recent cracks in the authoritative reports of the UN's Nobel Prize– winning global warming panel. "We enter this process with no preconceived conclusions", said Robbert Dijkgraaf, a Dutch mathematical physicist who co– chairs the group, the Inter Academy Council of 15 nations' national academies of science. Climate scientists say the challenge is to pick outside experts for the review since almost anybody who has been involved in climate science has some connection with IPCC UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon asserted "there were a very small number of errors" in the 3,000 pages of the beleaguered UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's last major synthesis of climate data in 2007. But those errors, which include projections of retreats in Himalayan glaciers, have put public confidence in the panel's work at risk, and have been seized on by climate skeptics opposed to the UN-Ied efforts to conclude a legal international agreement on global warming this year. Dijkgraaf said his Netherlands-based group, which agreed to the UN's request to review the panel's work, "Will definitely not go over all the data, the vast amount of data in climate science," but will instead focus on how the panel does it job, in light of the unsettling errors that have surfaced recently. The group will first pick a panel of outside experts, no easy task since the bulk of climate experts already participate in the UN panel. It will then wrap up its independent review by the end of August, said Dijkgraaf, also president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Chris Field, a Stanford University professor who in 2008 took over as head of an IPCC group studying climate impacts, said the Inter-Academy Council faces a challenge the review since "almost anybody who has been involved in climate science has some connection with the IPCC". Among the questions are whether the UN climate panel should use non-peer reviewed literature , how governments review IPCC material, and even how the IPCC communicates with the public. No errors surfaced in the earlier and most well-known of the reports, which said the physics of a warming atmosphere and rising seas is man-made and incontrovertible. But there have been several mistakes discovered in the second of the four climate research reports produced in 2007, mainly owing to the use of government reports or even advocacy group reports instead of peer-reviewed research. Courtesy: The Times of India, March 12, 2010, P22. 'ANOTHER UN CLIMATE CHANGE REPORT FLAWED' London, 24 March: The UN has admitted that a 2006 report concluding that livestock farming is responsible for 18 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions was ''flawed" and exaggerated the impact of eating meat on climate change. The report 'Livestock's Long Shadow' was heralded by campaigners urging consumers to eat less meat to save the planet. Leading figu res in the climate change establishment, such as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Chairman Dr. Rajendra Pachauri and Lord (Nicholas) Stern, have also quoted the 18 per cent figure as a reason why people should consider eating less meat. But a new analysis, presented at a US science meeting, said linking of livestock production to 18 per cent of carbon emission , more than transport, was "flawed", the BBC reported. 40