In rejecting mitigation strategies, the report banks on the ability of human beings to think and come out with intelligent solution to any problem. “When faced with a threat, humans are not generally passive. We react, identify the source of the threat and seek to address it. The more entrepreneurial among us convert the threat into opportunities,” it said.

The report rejected the theory that the observed global warming was a result of carbon emissions. “In his famous film on climate change An Inconvenient Truth, former US vice-president Al Gore shows a graph depicting the correlation between earth’s temperature and carbon emissions. But correlation is not causation,” said Deepak Lal, a professor at the University of California, who was present at the function.

He said efforts were on to prove an alternative hypothesis which suggests that the warming was being caused by cosmic rays that keep bombarding the earth.

The report was released by Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia, who is closely involved with India’s efforts to come up with a National Action Plan on climate change under the instruction of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Clearly uncomfortable in the company of people who were challenging widely-accepted beliefs on the issue, Montek wondered aloud whether more than 2,500 scientists in the IPCC could go so horribly wrong as the current report made them out to be.