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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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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.
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 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.
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!
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.
The problem is that gullible idiots like you make unwarranted assumptions about the quality of the scientific evidence based on no more than faith. And every piece of evidence to the contrary is summarily ignored.
The problem isn't with the "deniers" who are pointing all of these problems out. The "deniers" don't deny climate change or even global warming. They just deny the right of censorious assholes like you to claim that climate change is a) unprecedented and b) caused by man-made fossil fuels without actual engineering-quality reports showing either of these things to be true or even likely. They aren't the ones in denial - it's you.
The smell from underneath the IPCC bandages is pretty bad. The proxy reconstructions of past climate have been shown to be heavily cherry-picked and badly done statistics, the measurement of surface temperatures by NOAA and NASA appears been heavily manipulated to show warming, as has the temperature records from the Climate Research Unit relied upon for the calibration of climate models - and is the subject of several independent investigations for possible scientific fraud in the US and the UK.
But you'll ignore it all because it comes from "deniers" and you'll invoke preposterous conspiracy theories involving fossil fuel companies while ignoring the cosying up of nearly entire fossil fuel industry with the alarmists.You'll ignore the clear conflict of interest of the scientist who made the original bad claim on Himalayan Glaciers claiming millions from the European Union to investigate the problem that he knows doesn't exist. You'll ignore the clear conflict of interest of Rajendra Pachauri and his willingness to fill his pockets with cash all the while exhorting everyone else to embrace the New Poverty of enforced energy rationing to Save the Earth from Global Warming that no-one knows is even happening to any great extent nor even a serious problem that can be "fixed".
Those aren't typos. The entire climate science story is falling apart as scientists investigate clear evidence of fraud, conscious manipulation of evidence in order to deceive and junk science.
The "deniers" are not the problem - its the neo-creationists like you who keep waving away that "there's nothing to be seen here - move along" while the Global Warming Hysteria explodes behind you.
And yes, I'm a liberal. A very angry liberal.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
I grew up in the military industrial complex. You know what the military did every time they wanted a shiny new toy? They created this big boogy man. Back then it was the "Soviets have this new Mig-25 that goes Mach 3+. We must have something to counter it". "The Soviets have this new T-80 tank, we need something to counter it". And the thing of it was the Military damn well knew that the T-80 was a dressed up T-72 and that the F-15 would beat a MIG-25 any day of the week. Yeah, the MIG-25 could go Mach 3....once before the engines had to be replaced. And the people in the defense industry as well as the DOD knew this, but they played the boogey man to Congress and the American people.
I'm sorry, but I see the same thing happening with this whole Environmental and Global Warming thing. Are there real problems out there? Should be trying not to pollute? Yes. But the tactics these people are using remind me too much of what I saw from the Defense industry.
These predictions reminds me of an article around 1900 that claimed that if trends continue, the horse manure on the streets of chicago would be 6 ft. deep by 1930. It never happened, the automobile came along and replaced horses. And that, perhaps, is the biggest problem with these predictions. The longer the predicted , the less likely the prediction is to be correct. Things change and I don't believe we have a model yet that works. I don't believe a working model can be created either. Show me one of these ecological dire predictions that I remember hearing in the 1970's and 1980's that have come to pass. I remember the presentations back then saying New York would be underwater by 2010! What about global dimming back in the 1970's? Whatever happened to that?
None of these models can even begin to take into account uncertainty. What happens if there is a massive Krakatoa type eruption in the next 50 years? Or in this case, the next 350 years? What if there continues to be a lack of sun spot activity for the next 350 years. It's happened before. Oh wait, the Little Ice Age was just a fluke right? We'd better adjust our data and pretend that it and the Medieval warm period never happened according to our models.
The problem is this has all become political. It's more about power and money than science at this point.
There are real environmental problems out there. Not only that, but they are problems affecting people's health and real steps we know work can be taken today to help clean them up and instead of spending the money and resources to help fix those problems, it looks as though we are going to spending a bunch of money world wide to fix a problem that is appearing to be more suspect everyday.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
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:
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
In case you guys are wondering, this is what a moderate denier looks like. He looks like he's making sense, and his position seems perfectly rational and thought out, but that just makes it all the more dangerous because it's still wrong and full of logical fallacies.
I grew up in the military industrial complex. You know what the military did every time they wanted a shiny new toy? They created this big boogy man. Back then it was the "Soviets have this new Mig-25 that goes Mach 3+. We must have something to counter it". "The Soviets have this new T-80 tank, we need something to counter it". And the thing of it was the Military damn well knew that the T-80 was a dressed up T-72 and that the F-15 would beat a MIG-25 any day of the week. Yeah, the MIG-25 could go Mach 3....once before the engines had to be replaced. And the people in the defense industry as well as the DOD knew this, but they played the boogey man to Congress and the American people.
I'm sorry, but I see the same thing happening with this whole Environmental and Global Warming thing. Are there real problems out there? Should be trying not to pollute? Yes. But the tactics these people are using remind me too much of what I saw from the Defense industry.
Basically, you're saying that you've noticed that when people lie to you, the common thing is that they use words. Scientists... also use words, hence they must also be liars!
Err.. no. The techniques are similar in the sense that group 'A' is crying wolf when there is no wolf, and group 'B' is crying wolf because everyone's about to get eaten.
... and group 'A' sells wolf hunting equipment, while group 'B' has bite marks.
These predictions reminds me of an article around 1900 that claimed that if trends continue, the horse manure on the streets of chicago would be 6 ft. deep by 1930. It never happened, the automobile came along and replaced horses. And that, perhaps, is the biggest problem with these predictions. The longer the predicted , the less likely the prediction is to be correct. Things change and I don't believe we have a model yet that works.
"I read a prediction by an idiot once, hence, all people making predictions must also be idiots."
or
"Some people failed at making a prediction, so all predictions are actually impossible to make."
I don't believe a working model can be created either. Show me one of these ecological dire predictions that I remember hearing in the 1970's and 1980's that have come to pass. I remember the presentations back then saying New York would be underwater by 2010! What about global dimming back in the 1970's? Whatever happened to that?
None of these models can even begin to take into account uncertainty.
On the contrary, ALL scientific models take into account uncertainty. That's easy. The reason those old models were inaccurate was precisely because the uncertainties were so great. There was less data, it was of lower quality, and the analytical techniques just weren't there yet.
That does not mean that current predictions are just as uncertain. The work of thousands of scientists over the last few decades has been to reduce those uncertainties. They've been measuring glaciers with GPS, drilling cores in ice, collecting tree ring data from around the world, analyzing satellite imaging data, etc...
The result is still uncertain. For example, the actions of humans themselves is very hard to predict. We don't know exactly what the post-peak-oil curve will look like. We don't know if nuclear power will contribute significantly to energy use in the near future or not. Fusion might become cheap and practical. There might be some disease that wipes out 95% of people.
However, if things continue as they are going now, including the seemingly unstoppable exponential growth in population, then we're boned. This is clear to anyone who's seen the evidence and can c
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