Friday, 25th
February 2011,
4.00 p.m. to
5.30 p.m.
Marshal
Hall, Jawaharlal Nehru Library,
Vidyanagari,
University of Mumbai,
Santacruz
(East), Mumbai
It is with great pleasure to let you know Prof Dr. Madhav Khandekar is in India and giving a lecture next week. Many of you may ask just who exactly is Dr. Madhav Khandekar?Dr. Madhav Khandekar is a former research scientist from Environment Canada (in Toronto, Canada) and has been in the weather & climate science for over 53 years. He holds an M. Sc. degree in Statistics from Pune University and an M. S. and Ph. D. degree in meteorology from the Florida State University, USA. Dr. Khandekar has published well over 130 research papers, including over 40 peer-reviewed papers in various international Journals and authored a book on ocean surface wave analysis and modeling, published by Springer-Verlag in 1989.Khandekar is presently on the editorial board of the Journal Natural Hazards (Netherlands) and is a former editor of the journal Climate Research (Germany). He was an expert reviewer for the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) AR4 published in 2007. Dr. Khandekar continues his research at present on global warming/extreme weather link and Indian/Asian Monsoon inter-annual variability. He is also closely associated with the "Natural Resource Stewardship Project" (NRSP), led by a pal of mine, executive director Tom Harris and renowned climatologist, Dr. Tim Ball.During an interview during the Himalayan Glacier controversy, a claim of rapid glacier melt that the IPCC later retracted from their report, Khandekar apart from scientifically contesting it, quoted from Hindu mythology."There is a good documented history of India when Lord Rama ruled what is now often referred to a Ram-Rajya a Ram-Kingdom, considered as the most law-abiding and a Golden period of Hindu history. According to most Indologists Lord Ram's birth was about 5100 years ago that is 5100 BP. After Lord Ram's time, there was the Great epic Mahabharat when Lord Krishna delivered the Great Hindu Epic Geeta at the battlefield between two rival families etc. Lord Krishna's time was probably 3500 yrs BP. "Lord Ram and the Mahabharat period were in the Holocene period, where global temperatures were much more warmer than present. The point Khandekar was making was according to Hindu epics, there was no reference ever about Himalayan glaciers changing or the River Ganges depleting and becoming only a Monsoon-season River. So logically, if present temperatures are lower than the Holocene period, then climate change cannot be the culprit behind the Himalayan glacier melt. In one of our archives, we broke the story of a new peer reviewed study by scientists at the Universities of California and Potsdam who found as the key factor affecting the advance or retreat of the Karakoram glaciers the amount of debris strewn on their surface!"Please do not miss the lecture being organized by the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies & Instucen Trust, Mumbai which will be presided by Dr Bal Phondke, Nuclear Biologist and science communicator. The lecture abstract is given below:"There is an intense debate on the topic of global warming & climate change in recent years in the media as well as in the scientific community. The term ‘global warming’ refers to the warming of the earth's surface (land-water combined) due to human-added carbon dioxide because of worldwide industrial activity. This talk will survey the global warming science and will highlight several uncertainties in the science. The talk will discuss other processes like large-scale atmosphere/ocean circulation changes, urban impact and solar variability, which influence mean temperature over various regions of the earth. The talk will then discuss present and future global warming impact on extreme weather events, sea level rise and other climate events and changes. Finally, the talk will present an alternative approach of a simple adaptation strategy to "combat" future climate change."
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