India Ditches UN Climate Change Group

Several readers have told us that the Indian Government is moving to establish its own group to address the science of climate change since it "cannot rely" on the official United Nations panel. "The move is a severe blow to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) following the revelation parts of its 3000 page 2007 report on climate science was not subjected to peer review. A primary claim of the report was the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035, but the claim was not repeated in any peer-reviewed studies and rebuffed by scientists. India's environment minister Jairam Ramesh announced that the Indian government will established a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor climate change in the region. 'There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism,' Ramesh said. 'I am for climate science.'"

Comments

See also: China, Russia....

[shutdown -p now]

Take Russia. It also regularly disputes AGW claims.

At the same time, it coincidentally happens to be a major oil exporter, and world largest natural gas exporter. Its economy to a large extent depends on worldwide demand for those resources - oil alone accounts for 40% of all exports.

Internally, most (~65%) power is generated by coal and gas plants. The USSR had a long-term program for replacing those with hydro and nuclear, for resource conservation and environmental reasons, but that only got 1/3 way through - and Russia cannot afford to proceed with that anymore, and is actually struggling to maintain the Soviet legacy.

Oh yes, also, if AGW models are actually correct, then Russia will benefit in many ways. One is that warming up Siberia will create large new swaths of habitable lands. Another is that same changes, as well as melting of ice in the Arctic, will provide for much easier access to extremely rich natural resource deposits which are currently very hard (and in many cases economically unfeasible) to develop.

That's quite enough dots to connect them.

Now, I wrote about Russia, because I actually wrote about it - but are China and India any different? At the very least, they all still heavily rely on fossil fuels to power their industrialization, and cannot afford to stop there no matter the consequences. And - surprise! - China historically had been dismissive of AGW. I don't know much about past India stance on this, but it would seem that them joining the club would be expected, purely for political reasons.

Re:Sounds like a coal industry shill

[Rei]

Let's look at "fluff.info", shall we?

Here, apophenia kicks in, and after you've seen that BPM and GDP are correlated, you'll have no problem inventing a model for it.

The first problem with that argument is that the hypothesis of CO2 causing warming came from *before* worldwide datasets were even availabl3e. It was first proposed in the late 1800s based on laboratory experiments showing that some gasses absorb heavily in the infrared range but minimally in the visible range. Secondly, "you'll have no problem inventing a model" for how beats per minute of a Billboard 100 song affects GDP? Really? Um, no.

There's also the problem that it is very difficult to write down a model for which there isn't another model with the causation the other way `round

Which is ludicrous in the context of CO2, since we can measure isotopic ratio changes (indicating the change in old carbon versus fresh carbon) and have good accounting for human inputs to the system versus sources and sinks. Is warming supposed to make us want to dig up more coal?

Without a model to say anything about the extra variables

Too bad we have nothing more than first principles itself to rely on...

(Actually, we do have other things beyond first principles as well! But that's another story)

For example, for many types of game, if you have two players repeating the game a thousand times, the distribution of actions that player one took will have nothing at all to do with the distribution of actions that player two took

If you're using that as an analogy for global warming, it corresponds to claiming that the laws of physics have changed. Fat luck with that.

And seriously -- do you honestly think that statisticians aren't involved in these papers? Really?

Re:Inconclusiveness

[Rei]

One major volcanic eruption would affect global climate more than any variance in solar activity, and much more than any supposed "man-made climate change" with drastic amounts of particulate matter being expelled into the atmosphere that utterly dwarf the impact of all of us.

If by that you mean supervolcanic eruption, yes.
If by that you mean major but ordinary volcanic eruption, no. Not even close. Even the worst conventional eruptions cause a couple year blip. And it's only temporary masking of the greenhouse effect, not actual reduction of the greenhouse effect.

Oh, and for the record: volcanoes primarily cool by ejecting SOx into the upper atmosphere, not PM.