The New Scientist swallowed its pride and has come clean about the hysterical claim they made in their magazine in 1999, that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by the year 2035. It turns out it was just “speculation” by a glaciologist at the time. But the big deal is that this speculation became an IPCC “finding.”

From the original article:

MELTING Himalayan glaciers are threatening to unleash a torrent of floods into mountain valleys, and ultimately dry up rivers across South Asia. A new study, due to be presented in July to the International Commission on Snow and Ice (ICSI), predicts that most of the glaciers in the region will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming.

“All the glaciers in the middle Himalayas are retreating,” says Syed Hasnain of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, the chief author of the ICSI report. A typical example is the Gangorti glacier at the head of the River Ganges, which is retreating at a rate of 30 metres per year. Hasnain’s four-year study indicates that all the glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas could disappear by 2035 at their present rate of decline.

Glaciers cover around 17 per cent of the Himalayas and contain thousands of cubic kilometres of water. Taken together with those on the neighbouring Tibetan plateau, they represent the largest body of ice on the planet outside the polar regions. Furthermore, their meltwater makes up two-thirds of the flow of great South Asian rivers such as the Ganges, on which hundreds of millions of people depend.

But Hasnain’s working group on Himalayan glaciology, set up by the ICSI, has found that glaciers are receding faster in the Himalayas than anywhere else on Earth. Hasnain warns that as the glaciers disappear, the flow of these rivers will become less reliable and eventually diminish, resulting in widespread water shortages.

The wheels are falling off…

Thanks to reader Josh for sending the scans in to us, and alerting us to the story.