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Pachauri regrets glacier faux pas
India Blooms News Service
New Delhi, Jan 23 (IBNS) R K Pachauri, the man in the eye of a storm over the wrong predictions of a Himalayan glacier meltdown by 2035 by his Nobel Prize winning UN climate body, said on Saturday that the warning was a regrettable error.
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"Established procedures were not followed," he admitted in an email statement to media.
Pachauri heads the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body on climate change. His statement came after media pressure built up for a statement on the issue.
IPCC earlier had admitted that it erred in asserting meltdown of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 owing to global warming. But the scientist on whose research the controversy was based denied he predicted any specific date.
"In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly," IPCC clarified in a statement issued from Geneva on Wednesday last.
However, Pachauri was avoiding comment on the issue and a host of other controversies and allegations of his commercial gains as heads of many organizations as levelled in British media.
Earlier, Prof Syed Iqbal Hasnain, the scientist with The Energy & Resources Institute (TERI) who allegedly made the Himalayan glacier meltdown predictions, said he never said it would occur by 2035 and that prejudicial forces are campaigning to denigrate scientists who have established the impact of climate change.
“To reiterate, I have not given any date or year on the likely disappearance of Himalayan glaciers -- neither in any interview nor in any of my publications in various journals,” said Hasnain on Wednesday reacting to the controversy and his 1999 interview in New Scientist quoting the date.
A warning based on Hasnain's alleged predictions that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 was retracted by the Nobel-prize winning UN body on climate change, Inter-government Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
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