Angry in the Great White North

The United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was unequivocal last year -- the Himalayan glaciers were melting, and melting fast!

In the Indian Himalayas, you can literally hear the glaciers melting.

"I've never seen such a high water level in this river," says Syed Hasnain, a senior glaciologist at the Energy Resources Institute who has been visiting the Chhota Shigri glacier for 23 years.

"This is 100 percent glacial melt," he adds, standing at the base of the glacier, yelling over the sound of the river. "After 40 years or 50 years, there won't be any flow in this river, and the entire valley will be dried up."

The 15,000 Himalayan glaciers that create the "Water Tower of Asia" -- the largest block of fresh water outside the Polar Ice Caps -- have been melting forever. But they are suddenly melting so fast that they are drying up. It will take decades, but at the rate the earth is warming, they may simply disappear.

"Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world," the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned last year. "If the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate."

As the director-general of the U.N.'s climate control panel, R.K. Pachauri says, "The melting of the Himalayan glaciers is a grim portent and the world can ignore it only at their own peril."

No glaciers by 2035!  Pachauri has issued his grim warning!  We must listen to the words of "settled science"!

No, wait.  The claim came from a magazine article, or a typo, or both.  Back in December, it wasn't clear which: 

Fresh doubts were cast over controversial global warming theories yesterday after a major climate change argument was discredited.

The UN panel on climate change warning that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035 is wildly inaccurate, an academic says.

J Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University, says he believes the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.

He is astonished they "misread 2350 as 2035". The authors deny the claims.

Leading glaciologists say the report has caused confusion and "a catalogue of errors in Himalayan glaciology".

But Professor Cogley has found a 1996 document by a leading hydrologist, VM Kotlyakov, that mentions 2350 as the year by which there will be massive and precipitate melting of glaciers.

"The extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates - its total area will shrink from 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres by the year 2350," Mr Kotlyakov's report said.

Mr Cogley says it is astonishing that none of the 10 authors of the 2007 IPCC report could spot the error and "misread 2350 as 2035".

"I do suggest that the glaciological community might consider advising the IPCC about ways to avoid such egregious errors as the 2035 versus 2350 confusion in the future," says Mr Cogley.

He said the error might also have its origins in a 1999 news report on retreating glaciers in the New Scientist magazine.

The article quoted Syed I Hasnain, the then chairman of the International Commission for Snow and Ice's (ICSI) Working group on Himalayan glaciology, as saying that most glaciers in the Himalayan region "will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming".

So which is it? A typo that crept in after quoting a legitimate scientific paper?  Or was the IPCC using magazine articles as data?  Turns out it was the second one, based on this article from today:

The original claim about most Himalayan glaciers vanishing by 2035 - which appeared in the IPCC report - was not based on hard science. It was based on a 1999 interview with little-known Indian glaciologist Syed Hasnain who told New Scientist that all the glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas could disappear by 2035.

In 2005, the WWF published a report describing the predictions in New Scientist as "disturbing". In 2007, the IPCC published a report that repeated the warning that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035, citing WWF as its source.

Now Hasnain has admitted his predictions were nothing more than speculation and were not supported by any formal scientific research.

Now at the time that the IPCC put forth the 2035 timeline to disaster, some scientists did speak up.  Pachauri, true to form, mocked them for not accepting the settled science of global warming:

Recently India's Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh released a study on Himalayan glaciers that suggested that they may be not melting as much due to global warming as it is widely feared.

He accused the IPCC of being "alarmist".

India says the rate of retreat in many glaciers has decreased in recent years

Mr Pachauri dismissed the study as "voodoo science" and said the IPCC was a "sober body" whose work was verified by governments.

Verified by governments?  A sober body?

Right.  Oh yes, and let's not forget that this is "settled science".

But now the 2035 timeline has been utterly discredited.  What does Pachauri say now to the "voodoo" scientists?

When asked how this "error" could have happened, RK Pachauri, the Indian scientist who heads the IPCC, said: "I don't have anything to add on glaciers."

Let me submit that Pachauri has nothing of value or interest to add on any subject, unless it is to explain his financial interests in global warming alarmism.

Do you want to know the truth?  The glaciers have been in retreat since 1895, when measurements began.  It is almost certain that they were in retreat before 1895.  The rate of retreat since then seems to have no correlation to carbon dioxide concentrations.  Indeed, some glaciers are advancing.  But any conclusions, one way or the other, are difficult to make since the glaciers are the least well understood anywhere on the planet.

As for the glacier melting claim, the word is that the IPCC is on the verge of backing away from it:

The U.N. panel of climate scientists said Monday it was reviewing a report containing a little-known projection that Himalayan glaciers might vanish by 2035, a finding trenchantly criticized by the Indian government.

The 2007 U.N. panel report says global warming could cause the Himalaya's thousands of glaciers to vanish by 2035 if current warming rates continue.

"We are looking into the issue of the Himalayan glaciers, and will take a position on it in the next two or three days," Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told Reuters in an e-mail.

Pathetic.  The IPCC ought to be disbanded.  I'd like to see Pachauri, Al Gore, and the rest of them investigated to understand what profits they might have enjoyed by promoting this bogus global warming theory, but these are powerful people with powerful friends, so I don't hold out much hope that they will ever be called out to defend themselves.  They can be stopped from inflicting more damage on us all, however.

But then we've always had the power to stop them.  All we have to do is stop listening.

Perhaps the revelation that the IPCC lifted a key prediction from a magazine article, and that no one in the so-called "peer review" process noticed it or challenged it, can add to the momentum that has been building since even before the Climategate scandal erupted.  Fewer and fewer people are listening.  It's a good thing too.

Some people just won't give up:  OK, so the facts quoted don't exist, the predictions are wrong, but that doesn't mean it isn't true:

A claim that the Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035 should be removed from the UN's benchmark scientific climate change study, an Australian lead author of the report says.

But Professor David Karoly, who is listed as a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report, said the ''failure of the review process'' does not mean that the main findings of the report - that carbon emissions by humans are warming the planet - are unreliable.

Well, I have to wonder just what it takes for a report to be unreliable.

Let me ask Dr Karoly a question (and I did, by email).  If the failure of the review process has no impact on the reliability of the report, why have a review process at all?  I mean, Pachauri claims that the IPCC must be trusted because of the peer review process.  So are you saying that if the peer reviews are conducted correctly, the peer reviews adds credibility to the IPCC findings, but if the peer reviews are flawed, then the IPCC findings are no less credible?  Is IPCC credibility a monotonically non-decreasing function?

Call that last line a joke for the mathematically inclined reader.