In 2007, a panel under the United Nations won a Nobel Prize for a report which suggested, among other things, that the Himalayan glaciers would melt away and completely disappear by 2035. Half of the world's population lives off rivers stemming from these glaciers; The Yellow River, the Yangtze, the Indus and the Ganges. So when a report wins a Nobel Prize for saying that more than three billion people will wake up on January 1, 2036 and not be able to take a bath, heads are bound to turn and eyebrows will be raised. Then in January 2010, The New Scientist magazine said that the magic number 2035 had no scientific backing. So where did the number come from?
Tracing it backwards it came from a World Wildlife Fund report from 2005 named 'An Overview of Glaciers'. But these panda huggers won't just put in any number without getting their science right. True. They got it from a 1999 New Scientist article by Fred Pearce titled 'Flooded Out'. So a pop science magazine must have done its homework before announcing doomsday. It sure did. They contacted Syed Hasnain of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, the chief author of the International Commission on Snow and Ice and asked him a few questions and he happily obliged. But now he says that he was simply speculating and did not do any actual scientific research. And that's what the whole fuss is all about.
Which brings me to my main point. Al Gore tells me that the internal combustion engine and CO2 is what is causing global warming, Levitt and Dubner say that its not carbon dioxide but methane from cow farts that's baking the planet. Then Sir Ian Rankin in his book, Doomsday Just Ahead tells me that its neither of the gases that are the culprit but that the last Ice Age was caused by polar shifting and that it is happening again. And when it does happen again, the North Pole will be in Timbuktu, the equator will be Poland and the South Pole will be in Ouagadougou. Leonardo Di Caprio tells me that buying a Prius will allow me to enjoy barbecues at Jumeirah beach because it will stop Greenland from melting and thus not flood the low lying areas and then Jeremy Clarkson tells me that there is no point of buying a Prius because all the pollution caused by mining the nickel for the car battery, processing it, shipping the processed nickel to Japan and then shipping the finished product to the point of purchase will already have melted Greenland to the size of the Vatican City and I can't have that barbecue anyway. And everyone says that they made all these statements on a sound scientific and empirical basis. All this makes no real sense. Its like saying 1 + 1 equals Paris Hilton. One can't wait to conclude that this is, in fact, all being made up.
Which makes me wonder what other part of past, present and future has been made up and have been accepted as norm because no one asked questions? In 1993, a U.S. soldier's body was dragged through the streets of Somalia in what was considered American military's biggest fiasco. President Bill Clinton called it America's 'darkest hour'. But director Ridley Scott has converted that into one of America's brightest hours in Black Hawk Down. Its only our imagination that limits us. It leaves little to wonder why Hasnain made his numbers up. Once we start re-writing history, now and the future, it is fun.
Historians have been telling us for decades that Babur founded the Mughal dynasty, but in fact what he actually did was discover the laws of gravitation. Asoka was the first important leader of a political coalition. Later, as we all know, he won the junior Wimbledon, and his brothers Vijay and Anand lost in the doubles semifinal. Vijay went on to become a great commentator while Asoka went on to become a terrible movie.
There is another silly rule which says the area of a circle is pi times radius squared. Off with that rule: henceforth, all circles shall have the same area. And while on the subject, let us decide that action and reaction need not be equal and opposite. That is Newton's third law of motion, and we have been following it for too many years. It is time for a change. Maybe one or the other, equal or opposite, not both simultaneously.
Why stop at that? Let us make up geography, physics, chemistry, the lot. Too language English the maybe.
