The Copenhagen summit on global warming and climate change has commenced. Instead of a leadership role, we will now be playing a followers’ role. We fell behind the emerging consensus curve. We held on for too long to outmoded positions of merely harping on per capita emission and common-differentiated obligation while disregarding many other significant factors. The recent decision of China, announcing a 40 per cent cut in its energy...

The road to Khardung La begins in the Indian town of Leh on the northwestern fringe of the Himalayas. Exhaust-spewing army trucks rattle up the side of dry rock, past Buddhist monasteries clinging to the craggy mountainside and alongside small farms barely scraping fertility from the earth. Khardung La, the highest motorable mountain pass in the world, is more than 18,000 ft. above sea level, the air so thin that...

The UN panel on climate change warning that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035 is wildly inaccurate, an academic says. J Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University, says he believes the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years. He is astonished they "misread 2350 as 2035". The authors deny the claims. Leading glaciologists say the...

India must resist developed country pressure to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, goes the cry. Such a position helps only the rich, in a tearing hurry to grow richer, the environment be damned. It is in the interest of India’s poor for the country to adopt a stringent policy regime to control emissions domestically and thus contribute to a binding deal to cut emissions globally. Climate change has been identified...

The latest UN environment report based on about 400 major peer-reviewed scientific studies over three years has warned that the threat of climate change could be much worse than predicted earlier. The UNEP Climate Change Science Compendium 2009 report warns that sea levels could rise by up to two metres by 2100 and five to ten times that over following centuries. (See salient features and links below) It says that the...