'Upgrade technology for climate change forecast'

New Delhi, Oct 20: Rejecting all the existing models of regional climate forecast as defective, a US based Indian scientist has urged the Science and Technology Ministry here to order specially designed computers for the purpose to enable the country cope with the impending climate change.

''We need much much faster computers for formulating better models, as general purpose model will not do to predict change in the climate due to global warming,'' Prof Jagdish Shukla of the George Mason University, Washington told sources.

''According to present models, rainfall will increase in the coming years in this century due to global warming, but these models are suspect because they do not simulate monsoon correctly,'' he said.

''Some models say the globe can warm up to six degrees over the century, some say only up to two degrees. In the middle there are 15 models. I evaluated each of them myself and reached the conclusion that if a model is good in current climate, then it predicts more than two degrees rise in temperature. '' ''At present we take something from all the existing 15 models for making prediction. But the fact is that some are good but some are bad. We will have to go beyond this model democracy to arrive a more efficient model for prediting climate changes,'' said Prof Shukla.

Some good for current weather many not be good for predicting future climate, he added.

India should have the model to use the data it can gather through modern equipment, he said.

Prof Shukla was recently in the capital to deliver a lecture on 'Global Warming: The known, the unknown, and the unknowable' organised the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations.

He stressed that India and all other countries should start developing technologies which can enable them to adapt their agriculture, water management and other systems to changed climate of the future resulting from global warming.

He said it was not certain as up to what degree the global temeprature will rise due to warming but it was certain that it will rise changing climate in a significant way for may regions of the world.

''There are things we know for certain, and even if we can't predict weather or monsoon correctly, we can predict climate, and the prediction is that it is going to change radically over this century.

''Even if we stopped emission of all the green house gases, we have released enough of these gasses in the atmosphere in the last 50 years to cause half a degree rise in the temperature of the earth,'' he said.

Replying to a question, Prof Shukla said that though some other factors like change in the axis of the earth over a thousand years, which changes the amount of solar radiation received by it have contributed to the phenomenon, man-made causes were responsible for adding to the gravity of the situtation. He said there a strong lobby in the US spending huge sums in convincing people that global warming was a hoax, but there are developments that tell a different story.

''Lakes are now taking six more days to freez, the number of frost days has gone down, carbon content of oceans was increasing and the sea level was rising by 2 mm per year,'' said Prof Shukla adding that these were irrefutable proofs of rise in the global temperature.

The earth, the whole civilisation is going to be very different in a hundred years.

''It is already in the middle of the change. We have much harder days ahead,'' he said.

With a change in the maximum and minimum temperature, the whole crop production in India will go down drastically if there is a further rise of three to four degrees.

Dr Shukla, who is also president of the Institute of Global Environment and Society, said that to cope with this scenario the scientists and economists should maintain a dialogue to chalk out future strategies.

UNI