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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."
If you think that's bad, for each of these errors that gets publicized, vast swaths of the population lose faith in the mountain of scientific evidence for anything whatsoever, including support for man-made global warming.
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Gpasp, there was a TYPO in a summary report, and the editing process didn't catch it.
A typo.
In a summary report. Not in an actual scientific paper. Not even in the _science_ summary (which is IPCC working group 1 report, "Physical Science Basis of Climate Change"-- this was the WG-2 report.).
Yes, it's an annoying typo-- 2350 is significantly different from 2035. Nevertheless, note that the error is NOT in any of the science papers-- it was in a summary report. It should have been edited better (especially as, it turns out, one of the reviewers actually pointed out the error, but his correction didn't make it in), but bad editing in the summary says absolutely nothing about the science. And, in fact, the scientists pointed it out and published the correction in a major venue.
The problem is, the deniers believe that even one error in a summary report means that the science is wrong, while the scientists are all aware that, yes, it's a bitch, but indeed, sometimes typos creep through.
All of you who have never had a typo show up uncorrected, feel free to kvetch.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
which estimated that the glaciers could disappear by 2350, not 2035.
Dislexyia... that would be my excuse if I were them... :-)
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
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.
The scientists who caught this error are scientists who support the consensus that global warming is a real problem. The distinction between good science and bad science is the ability to be critical of theories and colleagues that you agree with. In that regard, while this is an embarrassing snafu, it shouldn't alter our overall confidence that anthropogenic global warming is real and a serious threat to both environmental and economic health. I'm tempted to make a comparison to Piltdown man, a fossil hominid which turned out to be a hoax. Creationists like to point to it a lot but ignore that it was scientists who realized that Piltdown man was a hoax, not creationists. I don't think that global warming is in the same category, in that there are good scientists who disagree. But the general consensus is pretty clear. And events like this show that the general scientific community is still doing good, careful science on this matter, and engaging in careful critical analysis of their own claims. This event underscores that claims by global warming denialists that climatology is a cultish echo-chamber are simply without basis.
There is something absolutely wrong with the kind of media coverage. You're telling me that a transposition of digits within a report full of otherwise solid information is "highly damaging"? This is a false sense of even-handedness at best.
How is solid evidence of shrinking polar caps not highly damaging? The hard empirical fact that we've taken the atmospheric CO2 level from ~280 parts per million to over 370? The increasing ocean acidity from absorbing this increased CO2? The fact that widespread deforestation in the midst of de-sequestering carbon locked in oil and carbon and putting it back into the atmosphere on this level has a significant impact?
The question that will matter to all of us in coming years is not whether the IPCC had, in the midst of a large report of substance, accidentally transposed numbers when discussing a real and dangerous trend. It's not about whether or not you like Al Gore. It's not about the way scientists chattered in their emails while creating and testing computer simulations. This coverage of personality cult or anti-cult, the minor gaffes in an overwhelming body of documented evidence being treated even-handedly as if it thwarts all the rest, it is responsible for promoting complacency or belligerency in the face of a severe environmental threat.
Will we come to our senses already, or will it take soaring food prices and flooded cities and islands first?
I would be shocked if this doesn't reach -2.
Defy the hive-mind that the majority of slashdotters are part of at your own peril my friend! Other ways to get to -2 are to suggest that you believe in God or voted for a Republican at any point in time -- and God help you if they find out that you don't know how to program, don't like Linux, and don't like Firefly....those crimes are punishable by death around here!
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245636/Glacier-scientists-says-knew-data-verified.html
Whoever moderated this as Troll is being disingenuous in the extreme.
/. in the last 5 years or so - seems to be inhabited by
There is absolutely NOTHING troll-worthy in what amiga3D said.
See, this is what I've noticed about
people who can't subscribe to any anti-anthropogenic cuased global warming argument. So, anything
which is said against the AGW argument gets modded down.
FACT : AGW *IS* heavilly politicised.
FACT : anti-AGW arguments and reasoning appear to be met by insult,ridicule, and attempted censorship.
Honestly, people, if you can't simply argue your case for and against, in a reasonable manner, and have to
resort to insults, and censorship, then you have already lost the argument.
Some of those glaciers have retreated more than 16 miles! If you want my opinion, it's very possible some of those glaciers could disappear by 2035.
As far as I can tell, the typo wasn't in the research paper but in the subsequent re-phrasings by various groups. FTA:
*That* is what is so damning about the entire ordeal. The IPCC republished the figure from an article by the WWF which wrote their piece based on an article in a magazine which was based on a phone conversation with a scientist. It was a shoddy and completely unacceptable comedy of errors by the IPCC. I say this as a pro-AGW scientist myself; they really ought to be ashamed of themselves.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Correction of errors is what separates science from religion.
But I wonder if the press will tell people this strengthens the case, not weakens it? (ie. evidence was scrutinized and corrected)
No sig today...
As a resident of Nepal, I can tell you we don't believe these reports anyway. In a city where there are more NGOs per captia then people (a slight exaggeration), it's easy to see what the business is all about anyway. For example, why has WWF Nepal gone from protecting Rhinos and Dolphins to protecting the "climate"? Follow the money trail...
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
I am curious how and by whom you think actually discovered the flaw in the IPCC's claims.
Well actually anyone questioning these claims when first produced were called "crackpot" by the IPCC. So in fact there were other groups that pointed it out, but as is par for the course with AGW any questioning, no matter how scientific, is treated as heresy and ridiculed. Which leads to to wonder what other views currently being labeled as "crackpot" are actually just as valid.
Just how and why do you think the IPCC admitted to this error? It's not because they did any research into the claim themselves beyond the initial production, they had to be shown the door and then led through it. It was only when the embarrassment could not be contained further they were forced to make a statement.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
While peer review is better than unquestioned authority, it does have a remarkable blind side. The adage of mutual back-scratching and the fox guarding the hen house is all too appropriate.
The problem is that genuinely independent review of science is hard to come by. Consider for example how science treats dissenters such as Michael Behe. When a scientist points out valid problems in papers discussing evolution, he's villified as a creationist. And the interesting part is that his objections are entirely scientific, which incenses the Darwinists even more. Instead of pointing out that his critical analysis makes evolutionary biology a better, more rigorous discipline, his university publishes a disclaimer against him.
The IPCC scandal and Behe controversies have illustrated quite clearly that modern science is more about consensus than critical thought. While I agree that science *can* provide us with solutions to environmental problems of today and tomorrow, I'm wise enough to realize that it *often* fails to do so for reasons which have nothing to do with science.
People are starting to realize that calling something "science" doesn't make it true, nor does it make it science.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
If you can sort of wade through the homophobia and hatred of former American colonies, he's right: you will soon be charged the full price for your lifestyle. You're going to live in a smaller dwelling and I doubt everyone will be driving a 6 liter V8. Red meat will be very expensive because it uses an enormous amount of water and staple crops to generate, which will really get expensive once it's not legal to pollute local waterways to the point where they create thousands of square miles of deadzones in the ocean. There will probably be an international treaty on overpopulation, since that's the number one threat to long term human survival.
If this sounds like hell to you, hop in your El Camino, crank up the Metallica, and head to McBurgerndy's-Fil-A-Bell. Buy three triple whopper chicken bacon cheese towers, a SuperJumbo Coke, a sixty ounce curly mayonnaise french fry bucket, and of course thirty dozen cinnamon twisters. (Don't forget your blood sugar! Your kidney dialysis isn't until next week.) Stuff two of the burgers into your mouth, gorge on the fries and the cinnamon treats until you feel like you're about to vomit, and what the hell, pour half the soda all over your head to soak in the corn syrup and caffeine. Hit the highway at rush our, breathe in the smog, gaze in awe of the faint outline of bank and insurance buildings, and while you sit thinking about how awesome Lars Ulrich is and how they can't ever top Unforgiven: The Threequel, spike the last burger on your erection for the God Damn American Way of Life. Take a good look in the mirror. As a single tear unsuccessfully tries to crest your fat cheek, remember this moment for the poor future generations who will never have it this good.
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.