Indians go wacko

Asian ones that is, not red ones. And not all of them of course, only Minister for environment & forests Jairam Ramesh so far. The Torygraph says:

“There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn’t do the original research which is one of the weaknesses… they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks. “I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we have launched the Indian Network on Comprehensive Climate Change Assessment (INCCA),” he said.

He also, said (in essence disowning his earlier report, so clearly someone has stomped on him. But there is some bizarre revisionism elsewhere, with him saying “My ministry brought out a discussion paper on glaciers after it was found that major divergence of views existed between Indian scientists and the IPCC,”):

The UN panel’s claims of glacial meltdown by 2035 “was clearly out of place and didn’t have any scientific basis,” he said, while stressing the government remained concerned about the health of the Himalayan ice flows. “Most glaciers are melting, they are retreating, some glaciers, like the Siachen glacier, are advancing. But overall one can say incontrovertibly that the debris on our glaciers is very high the snow balance is very low. We have to be very cautious because of the water security particularly in north India which depends on the health of the Himalayan glaciers,” he added.

This is just politicking, and while it makes for some fun snarking there is precious little substance here. Someone will get a nice little empire out of managing the thing, and someone will have to produce some kind of output to stop the minister looking too stupid, but there will be nothing valuable produced by this project. I notice they say: The body, which he said will not rival the UN’s panel, will publish its own climate assessment in November this year. So (in the current absence of a sea ice bet) anyone care to put an anything on this? I take the side of: the report will be delayed, or if it appears on time will be an obviously valueless and hastily-cobbled together.

Any takers for the “it will be on time and clearly valuable” side?

ps: the actual setup seems to be at http://moef.nic.in/modules/others/?f=event, if you care.

pps: rather oddly, http://moef.nic.in/downloads/others/Final_Book.pdf says the thing was launched in 7/10/09. Did everyone just quietly ignore it for months?