How real is the fear of climate change?

Excerpts from India Tonight on CNBC-TV18 Watch the full show » RELATED NEWS Climate change debate: What will India's stance be?

As the Copenhagen Conference on climate change gets underway we ask, 'How important is it?' and 'Is the West changing its position and has India done the same?'. Chandra Bhushan, Associate Director at Centre for Science & Environment; Ambuj Sagar, Professor, Policy Studies at IIT Delhi and Surya Sethi, Former Member of Planning Commission, Former Principal Advisor on Energy & Former Government Negotiator - Climate Change, discuss the issue.

Here is a verbatim transcript of an exclusive interview with Chandra Bhushan, Ambuj Sagar and Surya Sethi on CNBC-TV18. Also watch the accompanying video.

Q: To start with simplest of question that was raised by earlier this week, there is now a real fear as a result of emails leaked from the University of East Anglia that some people believe that the data on climate change has been manipulated to exaggerate the situation and many are now asking how real is the problem of climate change?

Bhushan: I think its an over exaggeration of that leak. I don't think there is any problem as far as signs of climate change is concerned, it is quite established that our climate is changing and we all can see the impact now in India as well. So even the timing of the leak is quite a suspect, just before such a major conference you do this leak and raise a question mark on the signs of climate change, I think its quite unfair

Q: There is no doubt that the timing of that leak is most suspicious, most people will use to interpret that the leak is motivated, but is it not true that all scientific data are essentially interpretable and interpretations will differ and when interpretations differ there will be disputes. Does that mean that there will never be conclusive view about the data that leads one lot at least to argue that there is a problem, there will always be others who will dispute it?

Sagar: There maybe some people who do dispute data. But in the end the scientific process really is eventually about consensus and when pretty much everyone agrees on a certain set of conclusions, I think we pretty much go with that and move forward. Part of the scientific process is really challenging each others conclusions and the fact when scientist are in agreement about certain set of conclusions, eventually I think we have to move on. This is not the first time people have actually cast out, this has been going on for a long time.

Q: And this won't be the last either. But the consensus of the majority is what prevails and the problem with the consensus of majority is that it is largely based on data and analysis that is done in the North on studies that are emerging out of Universities and think tanks in the North and not in the South - does that unbalance it somewhat, does it raise questions of its own?

Sethi: First thing we need to understand is that climate is not a perfect science. It is not a science where two and two always make four but having said that I agree with Mr Sagar that one has to rely on that scientific process.If there was more data, if there were more observations from the South we would better understand what the impact of climate change is going to be on our region, what today we don't understand is exactly what is the nature of those impacts that we are going to face. We have a broad sense of what impacts are there but we do not know at what level and what regions and when.