Glaciergate? IPCC Claims That Himalayan Glaciers Will Disappear By 2035 Are Melting Away - Walter Russell Mead's Blog

Posted on January 16th, 2010 Glaciergate? IPCC Claims That Himalayan Glaciers Will Disappear By 2035 Are Melting Away Posted In: Global Warming

One of the most alarming predictions of the IPCC, the scientific panel that is considered the world’s most authoritative source of information on global warming, turns out to be a total fraud, according to this story in The London Times. The prediction that the Himalayan glaciers, the prime source of water for hundreds of millions of people in South Asia, would disappear by 2035 have been a keystone in the case for urgent action on climate change.

This is much, much worse than hungry polar bears; three nuclear weapons states depend on Himalayan runoff for vital water supplies: India, Pakistan and China.

Environmental activists have made this prediction a centerpiece of the campaign for urgent action and with the full authority of the IPCC behind it, the prediction has received massive publicity; yet it now appears that this dramatic and highly publicized prediction never had any scientific backing.

Here’s what The London Times has to say:

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

The IPCC, in what will surely be remembered as one of the most idiotic and irresponsible predictions ever made, assessed the probability of a glacial meltdown by 2035 as “very high” — a probability of over 90%.

As Emily Litella, Gilda Radner’s ditzy television commentator from the earliest days of Saturday Night Live would say, “Never mind.”

Again, read the whole thing here. If the London Times report is correct, this is some ways bigger than ‘Climategate.’ If evidence this slender was sufficient to convince the IPCC that this threat was real, it’s clear that the panel is more like Chicken Little than a serious source of scientific information. The lack of judgment is staggering; the careless disregard for the truth, the intellectual incompetence and the cavalier disregard for basic fact checking before making the wildest predictions of horrifically impending catastrophe are quite simply breathtaking. The IPCC chairman, meanwhile, with an arrogant ineptitude that would be comic if the subject weren’t so important, has dismissed critics of the prediction as practitioners of “voodoo science.”

The scientific case for global warming is in no way affected by this news and serious scientists have real concerns that the Himalayan glaciers are shrinking, albeit at a much, much slower rate than the IPCC claims. But if the Times story holds up, the reputation of the IPCC and its leadership may never and perhaps should never recover from a gross and careless error of this kind. Heads should roll.

18 Comments »

The error traces back to a misprint of the year 2350 in a 1996 report by Kotlyakov: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.128.751&rep=rep1&type=pdf

“The degradation of the extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be apparent in rising ocean level already by the year 2050, and there will be a drastic rise of the ocean thereafter caused by the deglaciation-derived runoff (see Table 11 ). This period will last from 200 to 300 years. The extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates— its total area will shrink from 500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2350. Glaciers will survive only in the mountains of inner Alaska, on some Arctic archipelagos, within Patagonian ice sheets, in the Karakoram Mountains, in the Himalayas, in some regions of Tibet and on the highest mountain peaks in the temperature latitudes.”

Comment by Luke Lea – January 16, 2010 @ 10:05 pm

BTW, the above conclusion is not my own. It was based on this story: http://www.chron.com/commons/readerblogs/atmosphere.html?plckController=Blog&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&newspaperUserId=54e0b21f-aaba-475d-87ab-1df5075ce621&plckPostId=Blog%3a54e0b21f-aaba-475d-87ab-1df5075ce621Post%3aa2b394cc-5b5f-47ad-8bb5-c1aec91409ad&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest

Comment by Luke Lea – January 16, 2010 @ 10:13 pm

[...] IPCC Claims That Himalayan Glaciers Will Disappear By 2035 Are Melting Away. Another “Emily Litella [...]

Pingback by Instapundit » Blog Archive » “GLACIERGATE?” IPCC Claims That Himalayan Glaciers Will Disappear By 2035 Are Melting Away. Anoth… – January 16, 2010 @ 10:31 pm

Yes, you would have to work a bit (but not that hard) not to find a more egregious example of scientific incompetence and public scaremongering than this issue shows. It is emblematic of the IPCC’s credibility or lack thereof. And the topper that the date was really written as 2350 not 2035 (as the WWF reported) is the icing on that corruptocake. Knock, knock; is anyone sane at home?

Comment by mbabbitt – January 17, 2010 @ 1:35 am

Luke, the Chronicle article seems to be even more damning then you are.

“Both Khandekar and Cogley seem to blame the error on a misreading by the IPCC authors, but I think this is incorrect. The truth is quite a bit more interesting, and the evidence is in the written documents. Let’s have a look.”

Read the whole article.

Comment by Quilly Mammoth – January 17, 2010 @ 2:14 am

“Heads should roll”.

Yeah, they’ll fire the guy who oversaw the glacier section in the IPCC report.

But, who appointed him? Were there any safeguards, or were they simply overlooked? Were other sections of the report handled as carelessly? Why wasn’t there any review of this non-expert’s “findings”?

The entire IPCC panel should resign or be fired. But I predict they’ll get away with simply transferring the non-glacier-expert guy to another job…worse, they’ll probably promote him out.

Comment by jeanneb – January 17, 2010 @ 3:20 am

The IPCC knew the data was faked from the beginning but kept using it to promote the global warming propaganda. No fear, no panic.

It is time for the US to abandon the IPCC and create an independent climate audit commission where all climate science research is allowed to be peer reviewed. At the head of the commission we need people like Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts, people who put science facts first.

As days go by the public mistrust of science and in particular climate science is growing and until such time as truth returns to the scientific process the image of scientists and their work will continue to denigrate.

Comment by Jackie – January 17, 2010 @ 6:47 am

And, of course, any “scientist” that makes predictions 350 years into the future is a fraud. Even the original, corrected, concept is idiotic.

Comment by David Becker, Michigan – January 17, 2010 @ 7:13 am

I’ve just wasted my morning, but if you trace the genealogy of the IPCC reports and how they are repaired, you are lead back to their first report (Climate Change, Cambridge U. Press, 1991) which unfortunately is not online. In the preface to that 1st report, which I have a copy of, the editors acknowledge that they have built on a previous report, SCOPE 29 (The Greenhouse Effect, John Wiley & Sons,1986), which, in turn, was built on 28 previous SCOPE reports, none of which are online (SCOPE, btw, is short for Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment). The first SCOPE report, which I also have, was published in 1971 (!) by MIT Press and is entitled Inadvertent Climate Change: Report of the Study of Man’s Impact on Climate (SMIC), hereafter referred to simply as SMIC. (Incidentally, Stephen Schneider, a now well-known climate alarmist, was on the two-man “Research Staff” for that SMIC report and may have been responsible for writing it, in which case this would have been his earliest publication.)

Be that as it may, the SMIC report was based on a meeting of “thirty scientists from fourteen countries” during the previous year and opens with a Sanskrit Prayer (Oh, Mother earth, ocean-girdled and mountain-breasted, pardon me for trampling on you). It then proceeds to lay out its goals and the methodology, from which I quote:

The stated goal was to provide “an international scientific consensus on what we know and do not know” about climate science [it being assumed such a consensus existed] and to supply that consensus “as input into planning for the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment and for numerous other national and international activities.”

As for the methodology, it is substantially identical to the one followed by the IPCC to this day. The technical findings were arrived at through an intensive three-week discussion among the scientists themselves working in 5 Work Groups “as well as discussion and careful consideration by all participants,” including presumably by Stephen Schneider himself. I now quote from the Preface:

“This Report represents the consensus of all of the SMIC participants. Each participant concurs with the substantive presentation, but everyone did not have time to review the final wording of all the chapters. . . . Some editing was done in the weeks following SMIC. . . .Because the major objective of SMIC was to raise the level of informed public and scientific discussion and action on global and regional climate problems, this Report was published as quickly as possible.”

Notice the sense of urgency and the fact that the scientists themselves do not have the final word in how their findings are summarized and presented to the public. The only innovation since then is that the summaries are now published by the IPCC several months before the scientific findings themselves.
–
Luke

Comment by Luke Lea – January 17, 2010 @ 2:29 pm

[...] While the blame game goes on, science being not exempt from it. And not a moment too soon we have a new word for a new scandal, thank you Walter Russel Meade, Glacier Gate [...]

Pingback by Relax, Gangotri is not going away, after all! – The global warming hoax and the Himalayan glacier scare. « India Unfinished – January 17, 2010 @ 4:23 pm

I am just recovering from a bender.While there,I had a great idea!To keep the world from being flooded due to the melting of the glaciers”in our lifetime:BUILD A THREE ROW LINE OF EVAPORATORS ALONG THE COASTS OF THE ENTIRE LAND MASS OF OUR WORLD!That would save the planet, provide pure drinking water and for other purposes like a shot and a beer.Where to store all that water?Why build dams at all the canyons!!

Comment by JOHN calomiris – January 17, 2010 @ 5:12 pm

[...] There is further discussion which mentions the strategic implication in The American Interest. [...]

Pingback by Gee... That's a Hard One – January 17, 2010 @ 6:52 pm

I guess if the IPCC have reported on something then the best course of action would be to think the exact opposite.
The shrill alarmism from this mob and the berating of anyone opposing them, just ask Martin Durkin, highlights the veracity of their so called ‘Science’.
The ‘alarmists’ as the IPCC call them are yet to make such grandious blunders or miss calculations. The IPCC on the other hand are yet to get a prediction even remotely correct.
What do the boys at East Anglia have to say on this…lol

Comment by Scott – January 17, 2010 @ 7:51 pm

[...] of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research.” Which is saying something. More from Walter Russell Mead: If evidence this slender was sufficient to convince the IPCC that this threat was real, it’s [...]

Pingback by ICE REMAINS, IPCC MELTS « An Honest Climate Debate – January 18, 2010 @ 6:46 am

[...] terrible. Thankfully we now know that isn’t true. Actually we know a bit more; Walter Russell Mead uses the F-word. One of the most alarming predictions of the IPCC, the scientific panel that is considered the [...]

Pingback by Will Garnaut and Rudd retract? « catallaxy files – January 19, 2010 @ 7:07 am

The Nobel peace prize has now been destroyed, having been awarded to two smooth talking conmen – Gore and Pachauri.
Nobel Committee – retract this prize from the conmen now, otherwise future awards may be considered a slur on the winner’s integrity.

Comment by Keith – January 19, 2010 @ 9:29 pm

[...] credibility of both the IPCC and its chairman in the wake of ‘climategate’ and ‘glaciergate‘ is giving countries like India and China the political freedom to back away from the policy [...]

Pingback by Glaciers Grow - Walter Russell Mead's Blog - The American Interest – January 24, 2010 @ 8:07 pm

[...] those clever sciencytists, and they let Glaciergate slip by? I’d call that more than a [...]

Pingback by Global Warming Hoax Weekly Round-Up, March 11th 2010 « The Daily Bayonet – March 11, 2010 @ 12:19 pm

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.