NUSA DUA, Indonesia (Reuters) — An independent board of scientists will be appointed to review the workings of the world’s top climate science panel, which has faced recriminations over inaccuracies in a 2007 report, a United Nations environmental spokesman said Friday.The board’s work will be part of a broader review of the body, theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program, who spoke on the sidelines of an international meeting of environment ministers here.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been under fire since it was pointed out that the 2007 report included a prediction that Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035, although there is no scientific consensus to that effect.

That brief citation — drawn from a magazine interview with a glaciologist who says he was misquoted — and sporadic criticism of the panel’s leader have fueled skepticism in some quarters about the science underlying climate change. The climate panel’s assessments are a crucial source of guidance for policy makers addressing global warming.

But mainstream scientists and the United Nations have said repeatedly that the evidence that human activity is a major factor in global warming remains unshaken.

Mr. Nuttall said the review body would be made up of “senior scientific figures” who could perhaps produce a report by late summer for consideration at a meeting of the climate panel in October in South Korea.

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The spate of recent controversies about climate research has given fresh voice to a group of scientists who question the mainstream view that human activity is warming the planet to dangerous levels.

Very few scientists disagree that the earth’s climate has warmed since 1850. But some have long argued that there are too many uncertainties about man’s role in the warming, and that other factors, such as solar activity and the greenhouse effect of clouds, could account for a large part of the observed warming trend. Among this group are researchers who have criticized the limitations of past temperature records and mathematical models used to forecast future effects.

Such views are getting a fresh airing on the heels of two recent controversies dogging climate researchers. A United Nations group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, has been heavily criticized for publishing an unsubstantiated claim that Himalayan glaciers would entirely melt away by 2035. A recent report also included several other claims later found to lack a scientific basis, including predictions of the impact of climate change on agriculture in Africa and the retreat of Amazonian rain forests, among others.

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The political fallout from the IPCC’s mistakes was evident Tuesday when Texas authorities announced the state was taking legal action against the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to curb greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. In its filing, the state argued that the information the EPA used to make its decision is based on data from the IPCC. Alfredo “Al” Armendariz, EPA regional administrator for Texas and other nearby states, said he expected the agency’s efforts to withstand a court challenge.

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Dr Pandey’s paper  Inter-disciplinarity of Issues Connected with Climate Change, Food Security and Energy Alternatives has been published as part of The International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses.

Abstract: In association with the impact on forests, the major impacts of climate change in India would be on the land-surface and ground water hydrology and the agricultural food-production. The critical ecological challenge in future will be whether the available natural resources are sufficiently available to support food production as well as to generate ecosystem services. There already is a significant pressure on ecosystems because of continuously increasing population and extensive land use changes. Sustainable use of land and water resources requires that these scarce resources be appropriately allocated among various competing human activities. World-over, there is a realization now that climate change research calls for a multi-disciplinary and integrated approach. Moreover, it becomes important that at local and regional scales mechanisms of GHG-interactions with water, light, nutrients and temperature should be investigated, and the effects integrated in such a fashion as to quantify the cumulative impact of GHG- increase. This article, inter alia, focuses on the above-mentioned issues and delineates some of the activities related to the research being carried out in India. Some of the worth-mentioning recent research activities in India pertain to the quantification of environmental water demand (EWD), methane emissions from hydroelectric reservoirs, investigations into the inter-dependencies between bio-geochemical cycling and climatic perturbations, linkages between food-crisis, ecological foot-printing, ecological risk assessment and ecological economics.

The final issue of  The International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses has now been published.

Some of the papers included in Volume 1, Number 4:

• Development of Summer Thermocline in the Persian Gulf by Seyed Majid Mosaddad, Abbasali Akbari Bidokhti and Hooshang Basirparsa.
• The Silence on Climate Change by Accounting’s Top Journals by Alistair M. Brown, Isabelle Pignatel, Julien Hanoteau and Bernard Paranque.
• Climate Change and its Influence on Mountain Snow Covers: Implication for Drinking Water in the European Alps by Davy Vanham and Wolfgang Rauch.
• Climate Change: How much Aware is the Indian Youth? by Anchit Goel and Chetan Soni.
• Design of a CO2 Capture System for a Foundry: Approaching a Clean Development Mechanism by Arti Soni, Manisha Ganeshan and Atul Ayare.
• Climate Change, Contemporary Society and Engineering Practice: A Sustainability Journey by Abdallah M. Hasna.

The final issue of the new Journal, The International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses, has now been published.

Some of the papers included in Volume 1, Number 4:

• Climate Change Impacts: Adaptation Challenges for Pakistan by Saleem Janjua.
• Inter-disciplinarity of Issues Connected with Climate Change, Food Security and Energy Alternatives by J.S. Pandey.
• Composition and distribution of macrophytes in Hokersar - A wetland of international importance in Kashmir Himalaya by Anjum Afshan Mir, D. M. Mahajan and P. G. Saptarishi.
• Climate Change and Food Security: Health Risks and Vulnerabilities of the Poor in Bangladesh by Fariba Alamgir, Papreen Nahar, Andrew E. Collins, Nibedita S. Ray-Bennett and Abbas Bhuiya.
• Thermal Comfort Assessment of a Green Roof at the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture in Tucson, Arizona by Uttara Patil and Nader Chalfoun.

The decade of 2000 to 2009 appears to be the warmest one in the modern record, the World Meteorological Organization reported in a new analysis on Tuesday.

The announcement is likely to be viewed as a rejoinder to a renewed challenge from skeptics to the scientific evidence for global warming, as international negotiators here seek to devise a global response to climate change.

The period from 2000 through 2009 has been “warmer than the 1990s, which were warmer than the 1980s, and so on,” Michel Jarraud, the secretary general of the international weather agency, said at a news conference here.

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Dr. Prakash Rao was a Plenary Speaker at the 2009 Conference. Dr Rao has 25 years of experience in the field of biological conservation and ecology related subjects in India and overseas.

Dr Rao’s paper  Glacial Melt and Climate Change in the Himalayas: Building Adaptive Strategies for the Future has been published as part of The International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses. The paper is by Prakash Rao, Gopala Areendran and Rajesh Kumar.

Abstract: According to the recent IPCC report, the mean global surface temperature has increased by 0.74C over the last 100 years (1906-2005). Eleven of the twelve warmest years have been recorded in the past twelve years. The findings of the IPCC Assessment Report (2007) suggest that there has been a significant decline in the mountain glaciers and snow cover, which has contributed to the increased sea levels. From 1961 to 2003, the global mean sea level rose by 1.8 (+0.5) mm per year and the the global temperature of the oceans increased by 0.10oC from surface to depth of 700m from 1961- 2003 and 80% of the heat added to the climate system is being absorbed by the ocean. Other long term climatic changes that have been observed include extreme droughts, intensity of tropical cyclones, changes in the salinity of the ocean and wind patterns. In the later half of 20th century, a threefold increase in the rate of retreat has been observed in Himalayan Glaciers with an increased rate of retreat since advent of industrialisation . There are definite linkages seen with excessive increments in earth’s average global surface temperature as brought by various studies around the world.

It should be bizarre, but is in fact grimly typical, how the whole phony “climate-gate-scandal” has played out so far. Hundreds of emails between climate scientists were hacked — stolen — from servers at East Anglia University. The stolen materials were then misrepresented, distorted, and lied about, and the scientists involved abused, insulted, and accused of everything from deliberate fraud to acting as the willing dupes of the shadowy liberal-fascist “global warming industry.”

The bizarre part is that the only people being asked to Seriously Question Their Motives and Practices, or who are facing scrutiny for what they did, are the climate scientists who just got robbed, even though there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that they have actually done anything clearly unethical. (The worst bit is the suggestion as to deleting emails, something that everyone concedes is pretty bad and nobody is defending, though there’s no proof anything was ever deleted.) More important, nothing in all this nonsense even approaches a challenge to the science that shows the reality of global climate change, at least to a reasonable person.

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The first volume of  The International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses, is now complete.

The volume comprises four separate issues:

• The International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses Volume 1, Issue 1
• The International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses Volume 1, Issue 2
• The International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses Volume 1, Issue 3
• The International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses Volume 1, Issue 4

The second volume is now in production.

Proposals from China and India for the Copenhagen climate change conference that patent protection should be weakened for green inventions have generated significant concerns in universities, colleges and research centres.

Pro-intellectual property activists argue that a patent for their invention could mean the difference between a marketable, successful product and an interesting idea. Intellectual property rights or IPR and patent protection laws are coveted since they protect an innovator’s right to their hard work.

But developing country governments have noted that licences to reproduce a product can be expensive. China and India, along with 77 other developing countries, have set out a proposal for discussion at Copenhagen to liberalise global intellectual property rights for new innovations designed to reduce carbon emissions.

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