Premium – Gist of The Hindu: December 2013
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‘HEADS OF REGULATORY BODIES SHOULD BE ACCOUNTABLE TO
PARLIAMENT’ () -
DANGERS OF CHILLING ON CLIMATE CHANGE
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AVAHAN INDIA PROJECT PREVENTED OVER 6 LAKH HIV INFECTIONS:
LANCET
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RATIFY THIS CONVENTION
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TIME TO BRIDGE THIS RIVER DIVIDE
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MARS MISSION LAUNCH WINDOW FROM OCT. 21 TO NOV. 19
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A JUDGMENT IN POOR TASTE
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ARCTIC ICE SHRINKING IN VOLUME TOO: ESA
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MISSING THE WOODS FOR THE GREENBACK
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EASING TROUBLES IN THE LONG RUN
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VACCINATION WITH AN INHALER RATHER THAN A JAB
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METHANE SPEWING ISLAND RISES FROM SEA
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NPCIL, WESTINGHOUSE TO SIGN ‘EARLY’ N-AGREEMENT
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LITTLE REASON TO RESTRICT THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH
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MORE THAN BABY STEPS REQUIRED
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AADHAAR STALLED
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DON’T BLACKBALL THE PROPOSAL TO CLEAN UP CARBON
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RBI FOCUS STILL ON CURRENCY STABILITY
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ODISHA IS THE MOST BACKWARD, BIHAR COMES NEXT, GUJARAT IS
LESS DEVELOPED, SAYS RAGHURAM PANEL
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PANEL RECOMMENDS SWEEPING CHANGES IN CLINICAL TRIALS PROCESS
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VOYAGER 1
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AN OFFICIAL VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE
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AGNI-V TEST-FIRED SUCCESSFULLY AGAIN
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YES TO THE NO-VOTE OPTION
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BALANCING THE JUVENILE ACT
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NEW MANUFACTURING POLICY
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SIGNIFICANT PROGRESS IN BRINGING DOWN UNDER-5 MORTALITY
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NO PIECEMEAL CLIMATE DEAL, INDIA TELLS UNITED NATIONS
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‘HEADS OF REGULATORY BODIES SHOULD BE ACCOUNTABLE TO PARLIAMENT’
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To make top appointments transparent, the Damodaran
Committee has recommended that heads of regulatory bodies and their
board-level members be made accountable to Parliament. -
“There should be a transparent system in which head of
the regulatory body and his board-level colleagues appear before an
appropriate parliamentary committee once in six months to report on the
developments of the previous six months and the broad plan for the next six
months. -
Such evidence as would be given by senior functionaries
of regulatory organisations should be in the public domain, unless special
circumstances require any part of it to be kept outside the public domain,”
the commission, set up by the Corporate Affairs Ministry, said in one of its
major recommendations on regulatory architecture. -
This is the first time a committee has talked about
making regulatory bodies accountable to Parliament. -
The committee, headed by the former SEBI Chairman, M.
Damodaran, was set up after a World Bank report ranked India 132nd on the
ease of doing business in 2012, well below the other countries of BRICS and
the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc). -
The report says India’s regulatory architecture is
getting increasingly complex with the establishment of new bodies, which,
however, are inadequately empowered and insufficiently manned. “The
committee is of the strong view that before setting up a new regulatory
organisation, adequate thought should go into the need for such an
organisation and the ability to man it appropriately and vest it with
functional autonomy. The regulatory bodies should undertake a
self-evaluation once in three years and put the outcome in the public domain
for informed debate and discussion.” -
Referring to the contentious issue of appointment, the
committee says heads of regulatory bodies should be appointed in a more
transparent manner than is the case now. The practice of inviting
applications from interested candidates and subjecting them to interviews by
a panel of persons familiar with the organisation is the surest way to cause
loss of public confidence not only in the process but also in the
organisation. “The entire process should be transparent and should replicate
the process followed in some developed countries where the suitability of a
candidate is the subject of informed public discussions before appointment.
To appoint an applicant or a supplicant to head a regulatory organisation is
to ensure the suboptimal performance of the organisation and its resultant
loss of credibility.” -
The committee consisted of ITC Group Chairman Y.C.
Deveshwar, ICICI Bank nonexecutive chairman K.V. Kamath, Aditya Birla Group
Chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla, and Mahindra Group Chairman Anand Mahindra.
DANGERS OF CHILLING ON CLIMATE CHANGE
The forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Summary for Policymakers, it has been reported, states that the rate of global
warming has slowed over the last 15 years. It also argues that estimates of
eventual warming from a doubling of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are
lower than was earlier thought. Taken individually, each of these assertions is
a partial narration of ongoing climate processes. Read together, they carry the
danger of fostering complacency, both about the current rate of global warming
and the urgency in avoiding dangerous levels of warming.
Three theories
There have been at least three theories in recent climate
science literature seeking to explain the slowdown, or “hiatus,” in global
warming. Global warming is measured by taking an average of nearsurface air
temperatures all over the globe throughout the year, but this does not account
for the heat trapped by greenhouse gases that is transported into the deeper
oceans. Warming of the ocean waters below 700 metres has been exceptional in
recent years. A study in Geophysical Research Letters says that “depths below
700 metres have become much more strongly involved in the heat uptake after
1998, and subsequently account for 30% of the ocean warming,” precisely the
period in which surface warming has slowed down. But despite being transported
into the deeper oceans, much of this heat energy will show up as warming sooner
or later.
Aerosols
Another proposition is that a prolonged La Niña-like cooling
in the tropical Pacific has lessened the impact of greenhouse gases by 0.15°
Celsius globally in the recent decade. It is a natural variability and, if this
is the cause, the slowdown will be temporary, as a recent paper argues (Yu
Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie, ‘Recent Global Warming Hiatus Tied to Equatorial
Pacific Surface Cooling’, Nature , doi: 10.1038/nature12534). A third theory is
that nearsurface warming is being masked by an increased generation of aerosols,
caused by greater manufacturing occurring in China in this period and, to a
lesser degree, India. This particulate pollution is
harmful to human health but has a cooling effect in climate terms. In the
decades after World War II as well, aerosols from dirty manufacturing processes
— then in the developed world — slowed surface warming despite one of the most
rapid rates in carbon dioxide emissions growth. Unlike CO{- 2}though, aerosols
have a lifespan of a few days; clean up your industrial act, and their cooling
effect promptly disappears. These varied explanations help form a more complete
picture of ongoing climate processes. One assumes that this more complex picture
would be presented, if not in the AR5 Summary for Policymakers, then in the
Technical Summary, which in IPCC’s AR4 2007 was over four times as long as the
former. It would be premature to rush to a definite opinion before seeing what
these documents say, and hearing independent scientific opinion on them. The
half has not been told us.
The second major revelation is that the lower end of eventual
warming from a doubling of carbon dioxide levels has been reduced from 2°C in
the IPCC’s 2007 AR4 report, to 1.5°C. Some have argued, though, that most such
estimates do not include slow feedbacks. Feedbacks, in the climate context, are
ecosystem responses to global warming that usually cause further warming. The
effects of slow feedbacks — such as reduced albedo reflectivity from the great
ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, and greenhouse gas releases from the
oceans on their getting warmer (in contrast to absorbing them now) — take much
longer to play out. Including slow feedbacks in their analysis led James Hansen,
among the world’s most respected climate scientists, and others to conclude that
“global climate sensitivity including the slow surface albedo feedback is … 6
degrees Celsius for doubled CO{-2}”. Carbon dioxide may be much more potent than
we realise. Again, perhaps it is best to keep conclusions in abeyance until we
fully hear what the IPCC has to say.
Melting in the Arctic
What is really worrying is the complacency that these two
points — that warming is slowing and CO{-2}is less potent — read together may
engender. As it is, sections of the Indian political class are not exactly known
for their alacrity in responding to crises faced by the poor. Making them
respond with greater urgency becomes all the more difficult if complacency about
global warming spreads among political organisations and members of the public
at large. I have already been asked, at two talks in the last one week: but the
warming is slowing down, isn’t it? Even as we speak, the world is facing the
deadcertain prospect of largely ice-free Arctic summers
for the first time in at least 2.5 million years. Ice-free Arctic summers will
nudge us even closer to dangerous or even irreversible warming. The need for
that urgency has never been greater.
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