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Claims of Himalayan Glacier Disaster Melt Away
Hugh Pickens writes "VOA News reports that leaders of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have apologized for making a 'poorly substantiated' claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. Scientists who identified the mistake say the IPCC report relied on news accounts that appear to have misquoted a scientific paper — which estimated that the glaciers could disappear by 2350, not 2035. Jeffrey Kargel, an adjunct professor at the University of Arizona who helped expose the IPCC's errors, said the botched projections were extremely embarrassing and damaging. 'The damage was that IPCC had, or I think still has, such a stellar reputation that people view it as an authority — as indeed they should — and so they see a bullet that says Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035 and they take that as a fact.' Experts who follow climate science and policy say they believe the IPCC should re-examine how it vets information when compiling its reports. 'These errors could have been avoided had the norms of scientific publication including peer review and concentration upon peer-reviewed work, been respected,' write the researchers."
According to the NY Times article, a scientist (Georg Kaser) warned the working group in 2006 that the findings were erroneous. How did it take four years to bubble up?
I'd call that a pretty glacial response time. (rimshot)
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
About as much a typo as your claim. If you RTFM (I know, asking a lot on /.), you will see that the UN Panel wrote the number in the report based on "a 2005 publication by the World Wildlife Fund. The WWF itself had picked it up from a 1999 magazine article based on a phone interview with an Indian scientist". In other words, the UN Panel read a random non-scientific report and used the erroneous prediction presented there. There is a massive failure here -- by the UN Panel when they relied on non-scientific sources for important predictions.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Because it is not a transposition of digits. There simply is no forecast and the estimate that they put in is pure BS. From TFA:
"The IPCC apparently sourced its forecast on a 2005 publication by the World Wildlife Fund. The WWF itself had picked it up from a 1999 magazine article based on a phone interview with an Indian scientist.
Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, earlier this week, said that Himalayan glaciers are receding but he said the report they will vanish by 2035 is not based on scientific evidence. "
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245636/Glacier-scientists-says-knew-data-verified.html
The scientific process will probably ultimately work, but it doesn't always take the most direct route to the truth. I had heard accusations that the hockey stick graph was garbage, but I dismissed such claims as anti-scientific oil company propaganda. But after the climate gate emails came out I started looking at stuff a little closer. The disturbing thing is not the hockey stick graph itself, but the fact that they're STILL defending it. The hockey stick graph uses tree ring data that gives false temperatures for the last 50 years, but they're still trying to get us to believe that the temperatures those rings give from 1000 years ago are not false. Their analysis of evidence is so biased that they can't even see that that is absurd. The only excuse they seem to give on realclimate is that only some of the tree rings give false temperatures for the last 50 years. But if that's the case, and they knew some of the trees were giving false data, then why on earth would they use those known defective trees in their calculations? It's been reported that they used those defective trees because if they didn't, then the medieval warm period wouldn't be flattened out enough.
The climate crisis promoters have a tough job. Not only do they have to prove that the globe is warming, they have to prove that the warming is caused by humans. And then they still have to prove that the temperatures are significantly higher than they were at other times in the past. If the temperatures have gone from what they were when we started measuring them in the middle of the little ice age, and risen just up to normal, that would be global warming, and maybe even man made global warming, but nothing to worry about. The hockey stick graph and others like it are critical to their case that temperatures now are especially high. But it's very hard to accurately determine what the temperatures were a thousand years ago. In fact I doubt if it's even possible. Boreholes, sediments, and tree rings seem like very iffy measurement techniques. If we hadn't caught them sending emails about how they needed to crush the medieval warm period, then maybe we could put a little more weight to those past temperature reconstructions of theirs.
What are you talking about? The IPCC claimed the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. They based this on an article, based on an article, based on offhand speculation of a single scientist, who admits is was pure speculation with no supporting fact.
This wasn't a typo. It was damningly shoddy work on the part of the IPCC.
The paragraph starts, "Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world." Cogley and Michael Zemp of the World Glacier Monitoring System said Himalayan glaciers are melting at about the same rate as other glaciers.
From the AP report:
The mistakes were found not by skeptics like Michaels, but by a few of the scientists themselves, including one who is an IPCC co-author.
The report in question is the second of four issued by the IPCC in 2007 on global warming. This 838-page document had chapters on each continent. The errors were in a half-page section of the Asia chapter. The section got it wrong as to how fast the thousands of glaciers in the Himalayas are melting, scientists said.
"It is a very shoddily written section," said Graham Cogley, a professor of geography and glaciers at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada, who brought the error to everyone's attention. "It wasn't copy-edited properly."
Cogley, who wrote a letter about the problems to Science magazine that was published online Wednesday, cited these mistakes:
I am curious how and by whom you think actually discovered the flaw in the IPCC's claims. Science requires that scientific work, claims, publications etc. undergo some degree of peer review which is exactly what happened. The IPCC made a claim which was analyzed and corrected by a scientist. Error correction is one of the most remarkable traits of science that is completely absent in its alternatives (pseudoscience, political infighting etc.)
Sorry, but that's naive BS. Removed this week after British media reports? People were talking about this two months ago...
Here's a blog post from 12/1/09:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-imminent-demise-of-glaciers-due-to-a-typo/
See the primary sources here:
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0010/001065/106523e.pdf (p 66)
http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/AR4/website/10.pdf (p 493)
And I'm sure *someone* knew about this before then, but simply didn't go public about it.
Someone want to remind me why I should trust the IPCC (or climate "science") again?
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
CO-ORDINATING LEAD AUTHOR OF IPCC 2007 Report on ASIA ADMITS HE KNEW DATA WASN'T VERIFIED.
There we have it. Scientists with an agenda.
Who's being naive?
2. The hard empirical fact is that atmospheric CO2 has risen from ~280 ppm to over 370ppm. But there is no link between rising CO2 and temperature rise except in the reverse sense: temperature rises and then 800-1000 years later, CO2 rises in delayed response.
*sigh* - this is what is wrong with the whole "debate" - This statement is essentially a lie based on a truth, and it takes about half a page of explanation to explain why this is, but it takes only a few seconds to repeat the lie somewhere else.
I'll attempt to use less than a page:
(1) Yes, during the climate changes caused by Milankovitch cycles, CO2-levels trail the start of temperature rise by 800 years, the reason being that CO2 is not the cause of these climate changes, the shape of the earth's orbit is the cause. However, there is a feedback loop which kicks in as temperatures rise, which causes the ocean to exhale CO2. This CO2 then causes further warming, increasing the total warming considerably beyond what would be expected if the only effect where the orbit changes themselves.
So the "trailing" of CO2 in these cases in no way disproves CO2 as a possible causal agent in climate change...
(2) On the other hand, there have been warming events in the past that cannot be explained by Milankovitch-cycles, and there the CO2-rise (possibly due to volcanic activity on a massive scale) appears to be the causal agent, and does not trail the temperature change.
So basically, if something else triggers the climate change, CO2 trails because it is a long-term feedback, if CO2 triggers the climate change, it does not trail.
Since no scientist claims that only CO2 can cause climate change, there is no problem except that "deniers" use the (1) situation to falsely claim that the (2) situation is false.
there is no link between rising CO2 and temperature rise except in the reverse sense: temperature rises and then 800-1000 years later, CO2 rises in delayed response.
Fail. New Scientist Climate Myths: Ice cores show CO2 increases lag behind temperature rises, disproving the link to global warming
The oceans are not acidifying.
Fail. Between 1751 and 1994 surface ocean pH is estimated to have decreased from approximately 8.179 to 8.104 (a change of 0.075).
The reported change in the average pH of 0.1 is below the measurement error of even well calibrated instruments.
Fail. The very best (very expensive!) meters have an accuracy of ±0.002 pH units. (and besides, multiple replicates and statistical analysis is used to increase accuracy and reduce individual variance - or did you seriously think that scientists only sample a single point in the sea with a single meter to determine temperature change?!)
The Maldives had a sea level fall in the 1970s followed by stasis since. Tuvalu's sea levels have remained stable during that time.
The CIA disagree with you: "Maldives: Environment - current issues: depletion of freshwater aquifers threatens water supplies; global warming and sea level rise; coral reef bleaching" How sea level rise has affected the Maldives Tuvalu is concerned about global increases in greenhouse gas emissions and their effect on rising sea levels, which threaten the country's underground water table