Liberty Institute,
New Delhi and Mumbai University have joined hands to organize an international
conference on climate change on October 14, 2011, Mumbai.
Background
Unusual weather events are taken as evidence
of irreversible and catastrophic climate change. Increasingly complex climate
change policies and agreements are being agreed, with progressively more
control over different aspects of our lives. Inexorably, we seem to slip
towards the “Risk Society” of Ulrich Beck (1992), in which lives and politics
are organized around the avoidance of risk. Yet, in environmental terms at
least, the causal basis of environmental risk, and the implications of proposed
solutions to risk, are far from clear.
The United Nation’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was
formed in 1988, to provide an assessment of global climate change. IPCC’s
Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) released in 2007, linked the warming over the
past 30 yrs, about 0.7 C, to anthropogenic green house gases, particularly CO2.
In 2009, the Heartland Institute, a non-profit organization in the USA, had
published the “Climate Change Reconsidered”, a 800-page report put together by
an independent panel of scientists, under the banner of Non-governmental
International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). This report is perhaps the
most comprehensive response to the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC). The NIPCC argues that the fatal flaw in the IPCC lies
in its brief. It is "pre-programmed to produce reports to support the
hypotheses of anthropogenic [man-made] warming and the control of greenhouse
gases, as envisioned in the Global Climate Change Treaty."
Over the last few years, a number of significant errors have been found in the
IPCC AR4. Also, a number of plausible alternative theories have emerged
explaining possible changes in climate. It’s now over 20 years since the IPCC
first made computer model projections which when compared to real world
observations shows massive divergence.
In science, no theory can be seen to be credible unless it fits what we already
know – which is why we can discount any theory that appears to work in
isolation but does not conform to previously established laws or
empirical or observational evidence. All science depends on all other science,
and the theory with the best explanatory power is the one that fits best with
everything else. It is in these circles that quasi-religious language
abounds. Those who support the idea of human-induced climate change are said to
"believe" in it, while those who challenge this position are regarded
as "sceptics."
This is quite an odd phenomenon given that science is meant to be an
investigation of the world by rational methods. If anything, the climate change
debate should be fought over evaluating the data that is available, the models
and techniques that are employed to analyse it, and the conclusions that are
drawn. Of course, the current debate does not follow this formula. But we
shouldn't forget that climate science, after all, is a "hard"
science.
If the climate change debate is to be removed from the realm of
"faith," we need to go back to hard science. There is room for the
civic society to actively engage in discourse with experts, particularly when
debates are pertinent to public policy. This is precisely what this
international conference is all about. Academics, researchers, policy makers,
government officials, media, concerned citizens and civil society activists are
given the opportunity to listening and interacting with some of the best known
climatologists in India and abroad.
Conference Themes
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