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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."
Unfortunately, some of the scientists that originally noticed this issue were afraid to bring it up because of the politically charged nature of this group. Shocking as it may sound, there are global warming scientists who denounce anyone who disagrees with them, and have the power to effect the funding of anyone who is not in lock step with the agenda.
On the other hand, it IS in WGII, whereas the scientific case for global warming is laid out in WGI, so this doesn't affect that part directly, but really how can you explain away what this guy has said:
We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was "grey literature" [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal].......It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action."
The guy basically said he knew it might not be true, but he put it in anyway because he thought it might influence policy-makers. How can you not be annoyed by that?
At very least when I read the IPCC report now, I'm going to have to check their references, until now I was willing to accept it as fairly accurate.
Qxe4
I do not agree that this was more than a dyslexic typo that went unchallenged for far too long.
It's a good thing the correlation between global warming and extreme weather disasters like hurricanes and floods in the same report is still on a sound foundation then. Oh, wait...
When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses."
Ouch.
The climate is warming. The climate has been warming from 10,000-15,000 years, and we should be glad of that. It's hard to grow crops on a glacier. 15,000 years ago much of the US was under immense glaciers, as was much of Europe. Now they are not in our current Holocene epoch, which is why this is called an "inter-glacial period." There's are various natural cycles going on here, with spans of twenty and eighty thousand years roughly. My minivan's emissions did not cause the end of the Wisconsin Glacial epoch. After a few more thousand years the cycle will once again reverse - and the glaciers will return. When they do we're all going to have to try to fit into North Africa, Eastern China, and equatorial South America. I suspect the locals will have a problem with that when the time comes. And yeah, I know you know all this.
I am also aware that nobody has a good understanding of the dynamics of large chunks of melting ice, this is obvious if you look at how woefully the 2007 IPCC reports underestimated the loss of Artic sea ice .
I'm pretty sure that the dynamics of melting ice in large chunks and small are that if the ice gets too warm, it melts. The loss of arctic ice is attributed by NASA not to warming but to winds pushing the ice onto currents that conveyed it out of the arctic.
Nghiem said the rapid decline in winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds. "Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic," he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.
Quit scaring people with your pseudo-scientific dendro-science. We're on to your game. The sky is not falling. Well, the sky is falling, but it's falling far more slowly than you say it is, and in the opposite direction. Let us sit under the magic warm-monger tree and contemplate understanding natural cycles a bit more thoroughly before we deliberately attempt to manipulate them.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I like to tell people that I'm not going to believe this country (US) is serious about energy conservation until Democrats can see the Milky Way. Then it's fun to let people sputter for a while before explaining: If you compare a satellite image of the US at night, to a political map showing red/blue counties in a fairly close national race, you see that the lighted areas are mostly blue, and the blue areas are mostly lighted.
When we stop throwing megawatts into production of photons that will never be intercepted by a human retina, then a typical Democrat will be able to step outside on a clear night, look up, and see the Milky Way. Until then, there's just too much light pollution for the typical Democrat to see the night sky clearly, and IMO the country is not serious about conserving energy.