Jan
IPCC apologizes for Himalayan glacier meltdown exaggeration, sort of
You know the story already: the IPPC was busted in their “finding” that the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. Finally, with the media starting to pay attention to climate fraud, they were forced to issue an apology, well, sort of. We keep reading everywhere they have apologized, but it sounds more like a correction to us.
IPCC statement on the melting of Himalayan glaciers(1) – 20 January 2010, Geneva
The Synthesis Report, the concluding document of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (page 49) stated: “Climate change is expected to exacerbate current stresses on water resources from population growth and economic and land-use change, including urbanisation. On a regional scale, mountain snow pack, glaciers and small ice caps play a crucial role in freshwater availability. Widespread mass losses from glaciers and reductions in snow cover over recent decades are projected to accelerate throughout the 21st century, reducing water availability, hydropower potential, and changing seasonality of flows in regions supplied by meltwater from major mountain ranges (e.g. Hindu-Kush, Himalaya, Andes), where more than one-sixth of the world population currently lives.”
This conclusion is robust, appropriate, and entirely consistent with the underlying science and the broader IPCC assessment.
It has, however, recently come to our attention that a paragraph in the 938 page Working Group II contribution to the underlying assessment(2) refers to poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly.
The Chair, Vice-Chairs, and Co-chairs of the IPCC regret the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures in this instance. This episode demonstrates that the quality of the assessment depends on absolute adherence to the IPCC standards, including thorough review of “the quality and validity of each source before incorporating results from the source into an IPCC Report”(3). We reaffirm our strong commitment to ensuring this level of performance.
______
1 This statement is from the Chair and Vice-Chairs of the IPCC, and the Co-Chairs of the IPCC Working Groups.
2 The text in question is the second paragraph in section 10.6.2 of the Working Group II contribution and a repeat of part of the paragraph in Box TS.6. of the
Working Group II Technical Summary of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.
3 This is verbatim text from Annex 2 of Appendix A to the Principles Governing IPCC Work
The IPCC “regrets” what happens, but we didn’t see much of an apology here.
Where’s the apology in that? I suppose it depends on “what the meaning of “is” is” parse, obfusticate, BS. Good result in Mass last night.
Well if they apologised too much the funds would dry up. Its all about the money. Always about the money.
link:
http://itsfaircomment-climategate.blogspot.com/2010/01/we-got-it-wrong-un-climate-change.html
So? The IPCC regrets the poor application of procedures in a particular paragraph of their report? That same paragraph asserted that the total ice coverage of the Himalayan Glaciers would not only totally disappear by the year 2035 but that they would also be reduced in size by four fifths by that same year.
Confusing? Try this. That paragraph tells us that the ice coverage will be reduced to 100,000 Km2; (one fifth) yet later in the report we are told that the present ice coverage of the Himalayan Glaciers is 300,000 Km2.
So as I now understand the official position of the worlds premier scientific body, We have glaciers that in 25 years will melt away to nothing and also shrink by four fifths such that their size increases by three times.
The IPCC should regret that this is a lot more than clumsy avaricious stupidity. Not even the New Scientist or WWF reports were that stupid. It took a highly qualified, highly paid and highly intelligent IPCC scientist to paste that bit into the WWF report ……. or was it the 2,400 scientists that we keep hearing about?
Very clever comment! You need to write an article for us sometime.
This is how consensus science works. Some guy with a few letters after his name says something and a whole bunch of other lettered people agree. We don’t need no stinkin’ scientific method.
This just in! The National Public Radio blog is reporting that the 2035 “thing” was a typo. What the IPCC really meant to report was the year 2350, not 2035. I’m serious.
Sorry Joe,
Using the year 2035 was never a typo.
The year 2350 was used by a V M Kotlyakov in his completely unrelated report called “Variations of snow and ice in the past and present on a global and regional scale”.” It had nothing to do with the Himalayan glaciers.
Here is what Kotlyakov said about the worlds snow and ice coverage ……… its total area will shrink from 500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2350. ……….
Pachauri (Him a lyer) and his IPCC team of the worlds most superior scientists must have liked the ring of that sentence. It must have sounded even better when they changed the date from 2350 to 2035 and then pasted it into the WWF report. Of interest, the IPCC claims that they got that sentence from the WWF. They did not. They lie.
Believe it or not, and I have to say, Joe, don’t believe anything related to the IPCC, the year 2035 was used a second time in the same paragraph. This was in the preceding sentence that claimed that the Himalayan glaciers would vanish by the year 2035.
I would love to be able to tell you how it got used a second time in a different context but I just do not know. I suppose I never will and nor will anyone else. That year 2035 was used in the New Scientist article which in turn became the modified WWF report and then became the modified IPCC report. The New Scientist says that the date was given to them, over the phone, by the now comfortably employed scientist Hasnein. He now denies it. However he was a colleague of the above Kotlyakov and must have been familiar with his report. We can only speculate how Kotlyakov’s year 2350 was passed on by Hasnein and became the year 2035 in the New Scientist.
Here is a clue. About the same time as the publication of the New Scientist article, an Indian Government public information website quoted the year 2035 in relation to the vanishing of those glaciers. It directly quotes both Hasnein and Votlyakov as stating the year 2035. (in fact it quotes Kotlyakov’s exact sentence that was pasted into the IPCC report – except that Kotlyakov’s year had now become 2035).
I am sorry that this is so long. I find it hard to condense all this junk. Anything less would be unjust to Dr. John Nielsen-Gammon, Climatologist for the State of Texas, who tracked all this down.
Hello Noel,
Thanks for your reply. No apology needed. Please enlighten NPR.
Take care,
Joe
[...] had the Glaciergate u-turn whereby the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had to make a humiliating admission that its “evidence” for Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035 was an off the cuff [...]