The global climate has not been warming over the past 15 years at rates predicted earlier by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), according to a leaked draft of the to-be-released fifth assessment report (AR-5) on global warming.

The revelation, on the face of it, would seem that developing countries will have more room for industrialsiation enabled by fossil fuels than what the extant multilateral commitments denote.

But many experts say the developed world would only increase their pressure on countries like India as far as the mitigation strategies are concerned. Their contention: the new report bears out that whatever increase in global warming is attributable to the newly industrialised countries. The previously developed countries contributed little to it.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the big news is that, for the first time since these reports started coming out in 1990, the new one dials back the alarm.

India has voluntarily undertaken ? without legal binding ? to reduce emissions intensity of its GDP by 20-25% by 2020 and has a comprehensive National Action Plan on Climate Change for domestic mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.

Till now, New Delhi has resisted international pressure on taking mitigation targets including peaking year and instead is more keen on adaptation. India has argued in climate change negotiations that the principle of ?equity? that allows developing countries to pursue higher standards of living should guide the negotiations.

According to news reports, the draft report of the first working group of the IPCC also says that the carbon dioxide gas concentration in atmosphere may not be as potent in causing global temperature increases as was believed earlier.

IPCC’s fourth assessment report came out in 2007 which said that to stabilise at an estimate global temperature 2-2.4 degree Celsius above the pre-industrial average, emissions would need to peak before 2015, with 50-85% reductions on 2000 levels by 2050.

?Though it is premature to comment on the report, it seems that the developed countries may take a view that developing nations like India relatively peak their emissions soon, maybe by 2020; else, the extent of climate change will reach high levels,? said Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, member of Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change.

?The developed nations are talking of the 50 by 50 concept wherein they want us to reduce emissions by half by 2050. The report of the first working group on science will be used as an input for the IPCC?s second working group on impact. I expect the next report to take the line that the developing countries are corrupt and badly governed and hence need their emissions reduced drastically. The North-South divide which is permeating the negotiations has now seeped into the IPCC as well, which is considered to be a scientific body,? said an expert working with the IPCC, on condition of anonymity.

The next major UN climate change conference will take place in Poland where governments will work towards a universal climate change agreement covering all countries from 2020, to be adopted by 2015.

?Though I can not comment on the assessment report as it is in the draft stage and work in progress, it is true that the last decade has been the hottest,? R K Pachauri, IPCC chairperson earlier told FE refusing to comment on the report.

As per Shreekant Gupta, faculty at the Delhi School of Economics: ?The working group report may ask for urgent cuts in emissions but the question is who will make those cuts and is the developing world willing to pay for those? We need to know the progress of the green climate fund and technology transfer.?