The IPCC and the Melting Glaciers Story

by | Jan 19, 2010

This is a big post in two parts. The first is our take on the current story about the Himalayan glaciers. The second is a similar case of non-scientific research being passed off as ‘science’.

A story in the Sunday Times demonstrates the murky nature of the process by which ‘scientific facts’ become established in the climate debate.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.

The No Scientist has, in recent years, become something of an organ of the environmental movement, abandoning cool, rational, empirical scientific detachment for high moral tones, shrill alarmist stories, and a rather one-sided treatment of both the politics and science of the climate debate. No surprises here – we’ve covered the NS’s appalling commentary in many previous posts. What is interesting is how the partiality of science journalists exists as part of its own positive-feedback mechanism, such that oversight turns into ‘scientific fact’. So how does a journalist’s credulousness actually produce ‘consensus science’?

The original article by the celebrated New Scientist environmental correspondent, Fred Pearce was published in 1999. It reported that,

“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.”

In 2005, the WWF, published its report, An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China. It cited Pearce’s article.

The New Scientist magazine carried the article “Flooded Out – Retreating glaciers spell disaster for valley communities” in their 5 June 1999 issue. It quoted Professor Syed Hasnain, then Chairman of the International Commission for Snow and Ice’s (ICSI) Working Group on Himalayan Glaciology, who said most of the glaciers in the Himalayan region “will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming”. The article also predicted that freshwater flow in rivers across South Asia will “eventually diminish, resulting in widespread water shortages”.

In 2007, the IPCC cites the WWF

Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, 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. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005).

This process is what we have called, ‘Chinese Whispers’, after the party game of the same name. Ambiguity, caveats, and uncertainty get removed from scientific research through citation, especially across discipline areas, and when passed between the social and material sciences. Certainty is amplified; the context of scientific research is lost, rendering it meaningless. Why is the IPCC citing the WWF as a source of scientific data, when first, the WWF is neither a scientific, nor a research organisation, but has a specific agenda, and second, when it has the work of an entire working group (WGI) dedicated to providing the ‘scientific basis’, to call upon?

The Times quotes Pearce,

The IPCC’s reliance on Hasnain’s 1999 interview has been highlighted by Fred Pearce, the journalist who carried out the original interview for the New Scientist. Pearce said he rang Hasnain in India in 1999 after spotting his claims in an Indian magazine. Pearce said: “Hasnain told me then that he was bringing a report containing those numbers to Britain. The report had not been peer reviewed or formally published in a scientific journal and it had no formal status so I reported his work on that basis.”

So Pearce apparently found the claims sufficiently interesting, even though they appeared to have no basis in science. Pearce continues:

“Since then I have obtained a copy and it does not say what Hasnain said. In other words it does not mention 2035 as a date by which any Himalayan glaciers will melt. However, he did make clear that his comments related only to part of the Himalayan glaciers. not the whole massif.”

It is not clear when, since 1999, Pearce found a copy of Hasnain’s report. We haven’t found any attempt to address his mistake. Reflecting on the error in a recent edition of the New Scientist, Pearce says,

Despite the 10-year-old New Scientist report being the only source, the claim found its way into the IPCC fourth assessment report published in 2007. Moreover the claim was extrapolated to include all glaciers in the Himalayas.

Writing on the BBC’s website, Indian Journalist, Pallava Bagla, points out that the IPCC reproduced the error,

The IPCC relied on three documents to arrive at 2035 as the “outer year” for shrinkage of glaciers.

They are: a 2005 World Wide Fund for Nature report on glaciers; a 1996 Unesco document on hydrology; and a 1999 news report in New Scientist.

Incidentally, none of these documents have been reviewed by peer professionals, which is what the IPCC is mandated to be doing.

Since Pearce’s mistake in 1999, he has written many books on the climate issue.

  • Last Generation – How Nature Will Take Her Revenge for Climate Change
  • When the Rivers Run Dry: What Happens When Our Water Runs Out?
  • Confessions of an Eco Sinner: Travels to Find Where My Stuff Comes from
  • The Coming Population Crash: And Our Planet’s Surprising Future
  • With Speed and Violence : Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change
  • The Big Green Book
  • Earth Then and Now: Potent Visual Evidence of Our Changing World
  • Fragile Earth: Views of a Changing World
  • Deep Jungle: Journey to the Heart of the Rainforest
  • Keepers of the Spring: Reclaiming Our Water in an Age of Globalization
  • Regis: Regional Climate Change Impact and Response Studies in East Anglia and North West England
  • Turning Up the Heat

Before his 1999 article, he penned,

  • Ian and Fred’s Big Green Book
  • Green Warriors: The People and the Politics behind the Environmental Revolution.
  • ADVENTURES AT THE ZOO
  • Turning Up The Heat – Our Perilous Future In The Global Greenhouse
  • Dammed, the:Rivers, Dams and the Coming World Water Crisis
  • Acid Rain (Penguin Special)
  • Turning Up the Heat: Our Perilous Future in the Global Greenhouse
  • Global Warming
  • Watershed: Collapse of Britain’s Water Supply
  • Greenprint for Action
  • Climate and Man: From the Ice Ages to the Global Greenhouse
  • Climate change impacts in the UK

It is inconceivable that as prolific a writer on the climate as Pearce can be unaware of the influence of his error. It is more than obvious that Pearce has a political agenda that exists prior to ‘the science’ he reports. This prior-ness is something we have emphasised here on Climate Resistance as fundamental to understanding the phenomenon of environmentalism: the disaster scenario is the premise of environmental politics, not the conclusion of environmental science. Once this premise is accepted, so to speak, a priori, the conclusion becomes a given; the ‘science’ is almost immaterial, it merely gives numbers to what is already given.

It does not stretch the imagination, then, to suggest that Pearce was happy to overlook the lack of scientific foundations in Hasnain’s 1999 report, and happy for the error to be amplified, and reproduced firstly by the WWF, and then by the IPCC.

Happy that is, until now. The 11 January New Scientist article, which carries his name, speaks about himself as “a journalist”, as though he had nothing to do with it.

However, the lead author of the IPCC chapter, Indian glaciologist Murari Lal, told New Scientist he “outright rejected” the notion that the IPCC was off the mark on Himalayan glaciers. “The IPCC authors did exactly what was expected from them,” he says.“We relied rather heavily on grey [not peer-reviewed] literature, including the WWF report,” Lal says. “The error, if any, lies with Dr Hasnain’s assertion and not with the IPCC authors.”

But Hasnain rejects that. He blames the IPCC for misusing a remark he made to a journalist. “The magic number of 2035 has not [been] mentioned in any research papers written by me, as no peer-reviewed journal will accept speculative figures,” he told New Scientist.

It might have been more appropriate for Pearce to use the word “me”, and accept his role in this brouhaha.

But for the moment, at least he seems to be thinking about the process he is a small part of. His latest article demonstrates the rifts that are emerging in the wake of the affair.

Glaciologists are this week arguing over how a highly contentious claim about the speed at which glaciers are melting came to be included in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Glaciologists, it seems, are now at odds with IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri.

The IPCC’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, has hit back, denouncing the Indian government report as “voodoo science” lacking peer review.

Yet, clearly, following the words of Lal, about using non-peer-reviewed literature, Pachauri, on behalf of the IPCC has some serious questions to answer that are not answered by hand waving with statements about ‘voodoo science’.

One of the most frequent criticisms of climate sceptics is that their arguments lack foundation in peer-reviewed scientific literature. Yet here we see that in fact, one of the central claims made in the case for political action to mitigate climate change, had only a speculative basis in science.

Part 2

This all reminds us of a story we were working on a while ago. In Septmber 2008, Oxfam published a report called “Climate Wrongs and Human Rights: Putting people at the heart of climate-change policy”. We were unconvinced already. Humans are by definition not at the heart of any eco-centric view of the world. Moreover, the climate issue has been adopted by one-time development agencies to instead emphasise not developing as the most ‘progressive’ course of action for the world’s poorest people.

In failing to tackle global warming with urgency, rich countries are effectively violating the human rights of millions of the world’s poorest people. Continued excessive greenhouse-gas emissions primarily from industrialised nations are – with scientific certainty – creating floods, droughts, hurricanes, sea-level rise, and seasonal unpredictability. The result is failed harvests, disappearing islands, destroyed homes, water scarcity, and deepening health crises, which are undermining millions of peoples’ rights to life, security, food, water, health, shelter, and culture. Such rights violations could never truly be remedied in courts of law. Human-rights principles must be put at the heart of international climate change policy making now, in order to stop this irreversible damage to humanity’s future.

In our view, Oxfam had given up on the very concept of industrial and economic development as fundamental conditions of political development. Thus poorly conceived ideas about “human rights” had been married with climate change alarmism, to produce a chimera that expressed even greater intellectual poverty than its parents. We began looking at the claims made in the report, and tried to establish where they had come from. For a part-time, unfunded project such as Climate Resistance, this proved to be simply far too time-consuming, and other things were happening, such as the UK’s Climate Change Bill was being put (shoved) through Parliament.

We began compiling a list of the claims made by Oxfam, with the intention of asking them to show what their basis for them was. For instance, in the quote above, Oxfam say that scientific certainty exists about the relationship between the carbon emissions of industrialised countries and floods, droughts, hurricanes, sea-level rise, and seasonal unpredictability that they have, allegedly, produced. We didn’t think that this was an appropriate emphasis of “scientific certainty”. Where had it come from?

What attracted our attention most, however, was this claim

According to the IPCC, climate change could halve yields from rain-fed crops in parts of Africa as early as 2020, and put 50 million more people worldwide at risk of hunger. [Pg. 2]

We looked to see if it was true. All we could find was this.

In other [African] countries, additional risks that could be exacerbated by climate change include greater erosion, deficiencies in yields from rain-fed agriculture of up to 50% during the 2000-2020 period, and reductions in crop growth period (Agoumi, 2003). [IPCC WGII, Page 448. 9.4.4]

Oxfam cite the IPCC, but the citation belongs to Agoumi. The IPCC reference the paper properly:

Agoumi, A., 2003: Vulnerability of North African countries to climatic changes: adaptation and implementation strategies for climatic change. Developing Perspectives on Climate Change: Issues and Analysis from Developing Countries and Countries with Economies in Transition. IISD/Climate Change Knowledge Network, 14 pp. http://www.cckn.net//pdf/north_africa.pdf.

There is only limited discussion of “deficiencies in yields from rain-fed agriculture” in that paper, and its focus is not ‘some’ African countries, but just three: Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. It is not climate research. It is a discussion about the possible effects of climate change. All that it says in relation to the IPCC quote, is that,

Studies on the future of vital agriculture in the region have shown the following risks, which are linked to climate change:

  • greater erosion, leading to widespread soil degradation;
  • deficient yields from rain-based agriculture of up to 50 per cent during the 2000–2020 period;
  • reduced crop growth period;

Most interestingly, the study was not simply produced by some academic working in some academic department. Instead, it was published by The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). According to the report itself,

The International Institute for Sustainable Development contributes to sustainable development by advancing policy recommendations on international trade and investment, economic policy, climate change, measurement and indicators, and natural resource management. By using Internet communications, we report on international negotiations and broker knowledge gained through collaborative projects with global partners, resulting in more rigorous research, capacity building in developing countries and better dialogue between North and South.

Oxfam takes its authority from the IPCC. The IPCC report seemingly takes its authority from a bullet point in a paper published by an organisation with a declared political interest in the sustainability agenda that was the brainchild of former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in 1988. (Take note: Conservatives are often behind the advance of the sustainability agenda, in spite of claims that it’s a left-wing phenomenon).

That the IPCC is citing non-peer-reviewed, non-scientific  research from quasi governmental semi-independent sustainability advocacy organisations must say something about the dearth of scientific or empirical research. The paper in question barely provides any references for its own claims, yet by virtue of merely appearing in the IPCC’s reports, a single study, put together by a single researcher, becomes “consensus science”.

The situation is simply insane. The IPCC are cited as producers of official science, yet they appear often to take as many liberties with the sources they cite, as those who cite the IPCC – such as Oxfam – go on to do. To ask questions about this process is to stand against ‘the consensus’, to be a ‘denier’, and to be willingly jeopardising the future of millions of people, and inviting the end of the world.

The popular view of the climate debate and politics is that the IPCC and scientists produce the science, which politicians and policymakers respond to, encouraged by NGOs, all reported on by journalists. But as the case of the glacier and North African water studies show, this is a misconception. Science, the media, government, and supra-national political organisations do not exist as sharply distinct institutions. They are nebulous and porous. They merge, and each influence the interpretation and substance of the next iteration of their own product. The distinction between science and politics breaks down in the miasma.

If this process could be mapped, it would be no surprise to us if it was discovered that the IPCC was be found citing itself through citing NGOs and Quasi-NGOs, and other non-peer-reviewed, not scientific literature. This is the real climate feedback mechanism. Sadly, we have no time and no resources for such a survey, as much as we’d like to.

But would it be necessary to ‘debunk’ the IPCC in this way? Maybe not. We can deal with the arguments on their own terms, after all. We have argued here on Climate Resistance that whatever the evidence or strength of the science with respect to the claim that “climate change is happening”, the political argument about how to respond to climate change depends too heavily on the notion that “failure to act” is equivalent to producing a disaster.

To re-iterate our fundamental point, the problem with much of the argument emerging from the sustainability camp – as the report cited by the IPCC who are cited by Oxfam surely is – is that its premise is political, not scientific. That is to say again than the ‘politics is prior’ to the science. It may well be the case that the region that the study focussed on faces increased droughts, and that, historically, agricultural output in those regions vary as rainfall varies, and that rainfall is declining. But this is not the whole story.

If indeed, they are at all true, the claims made in the report, the IPCC and Oxfam, are only significant if we assume that mankind is impotent to address the water problems they describe. But the North African region covered by the study has a coast, lots of sunshine, and a lot of land. Indeed, the area is being considered for a huge solar-energy project that could power much of Europe and the region, and so its water problems could be answered by the development of large-scale desalination infrastructure. The only problem is capital. So it is somewhat ironic that the lack of capital available to provide such a project with momentum is not the subject of Oxfam’s report.

18 Comments

  1. Vinny Burgoo

    Credulousness, not incredulity? (Pearce.)

    Reply
  2. geoffchambers

    The story in your part 2 is dynamite – better news value than the glacier story, because it involves Oxfam, a much loved British institution. Pity it’s in part two of a very long article. When are you going to learn the media skills of the polar-bears-are-melting brigade?
    I take your complaint that you have not the time to delve into all this as a sly dig at us idle commenters. Like The International Institute for Sustainable Development , which you quote, I’m sure we could, “… using Internet communications, .. broker knowledge … resulting in more rigorous research..” Use us.

    Reply
  3. Chris S

    Good article.

    Fred Pearce’s particular brand of alarmism has got up my nose for years.
    He cares nothing for the scientific credibility of his articles, and passes responsibility for his inaccuracy onto others.

    Reply
  4. Vangel

    I wonder just how much Oxfam really cares about the poor. I ran into a wonderful book called, The Beautiful Tree, in which the author discusses his observations about the abundance of private schools that meet the needs of the world’s poor because governments are not up to the task due to corruption, lack of accountability, poor incentives, and other factors. The author points out that Oxfam, which is very aware of the situation makes an argument against the poor. It attacks the schools that help poor kids and demands that parents keep their kids in lousy government schools in order to increase the pressure to improve them. Oxfam puts ideology first and the interests of the poor last.

    Reply
  5. Alexander

    I grew up and once worked in the rural/agricultural sphere in New Zealand, so I have first-hand knowledge of the factors Fred Pearce misrepresented in an outrageously silly article that was run by the UK’s Guardian newspaper earlier this winter. His basic conclusion was that NZ is collectively dishonest using the “100% Pure” slogan to attract tourists as NZ has a higher carbon impactt than the UK, despite the screamingly obvious facts that NZ has only about 4.3 m inhabitants, its major industries are grassland farming of various types plus viticulture and forestry; NZ is about a seventh larger than the UK in land mass and two-thirds of NZ is locked into National Parks, a unique mix of indigenous Podocarp forests and mountain chains. If anyone invents ‘voodoo science’ and gets it into the press to be accepted by the great mass of readers, it’s Fred Pearce. Like his colleague George Monbiot, they insist they don’t do science, but have no hesitation in passing off their outrageous prejudices and misinformation as ‘settled science’. Why go to all the trouble of studying for and gaining an advanced science degree, getting a job in a suitable institution and putting forward carefully researched papers for the validation of Peer Review before publlcation in a recognised scientific journal; much easier to rush some ‘facts’ together, using all sorts of dubious sources from the madder fringes of the Green world and have them published to continue stoking the prejudices of their faithful readership.
    To find Fred’s hand in the misinformation presented as fact about Himalyan glacial melt is no surprise. The only surprise that he held his hand up to passing on speculation which the IPCC presented as properly peer reviewd scientific research.

    Reply
  6. Sceptical Guardian Reader

    I feel sorry for Syed Hasnain (Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi) he was asked to give a sneek preview of his research over the phone, and now (I imagine) his reputation is tarnished. It sounds like he had no intention to publish the exaggerated figures and he was just telling a journalist what they wanted to hear. I guess he should have known better…

    Reply
  7. David

    No Mr Guardian reader, you should not feel sorry for Prof Hasnain. He has been on Mr Pachauri’s payroll for years, and has had plenty of opportunities to set the record straight; instead he kept silent while the nonsense was fed into his boss’s IPCC report and sold to a credulous world as “settled science”.
    While the No Scientist is in self-critical mood, it might revisit its issue of 29th February 2009, in which it produced a map of the world showing what purported to be the effects of a 4C increase in temperatures.
    http://www.newscientist.com/articleimages/mg20126971.700/1-how-to-survive-the-coming-century.html
    As anyone can see, the local effects are typical of a 10-15 degree increase, rather than the 4 degrees the map purports to describe. For instance, the Antarctic peninsula, which is only above freezing for two months of the year, becomes a crop-growing temperate region. Utterly risible.

    Reply
  8. geoffchambers

    The real (and original) point of your article, I take it, is that the errors of the New Scientist / WWF / IPCC are exactly parallel to those of Oxfam, indicating the same causes producing the same effects.

    And now, right on cue, comes this article from Isabel Hilton on Guardian Environment
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/jan/20/real-scandal-himalayas
    in which she states, among other things, that:
    “Kyrgyzstan, scientists predict, will lose 80% of its water supply” [from glacier depletion]
    which provokes the following comment from the excellent MrEugenides:
    “This figure comes from an article Isabel herself wrote on 6 October 2009, quoting a local bureaucrat as saying that water supplies were under pressure from a variety of factors from river diversion and increased water usage to climate change.
    “The actual quote was:
    ‘Our scientists predict that by the end of the century we will have a 40% to 80% diminution of water supplies.’ ”

    You couldn’t make it up, but the Guardian can.

    Reply
  9. George Carty

    David,

    I remember seeing that very map in the Sun newspaper, so its been circulated in Britain among a far larger audience than the New Scientist readership.

    While I’m not sure about your Antarctica point (global warming would be most intense near the poles), where’s the evidence that warming would lead to the cataclysmic desertification portrayed in that map?

    The only place where deserts seem to spreading is the Sahel region, and there the culprit is probably not CO2 but deforestation. My solution — plant more trees in this area, and stop the locals cutting them down for firewood by giving them something else to burn…

    Reply
  10. StuartR

    @Geoffchambers

    On that Isabel Hilton CiF piece I noticed that the ability to comment got cutoff pretty quickly. Maybe because the MrEugenides response is devastating?

    Although no lessons seem to be learned by her I notice, she even ends with a classic unsourced quote –

    “Farmers in Nepal are already ­reporting new pests and diseases.”

    Not long before that “pest and disease” increase fact is just fact right?
    Is that how it works?

    Reply
  11. George Carty

    Looking at the first four titles of his post-1999 books that you posted, it seems to me that Fred Pearce has a whiff of the apocalyptic outsider about him. He isn’t making a call to action at all, but almost looking forward with glee to Gaia’s vengeance against humanity…

    Reply
  12. Fred Pearce

    You accuse me of having a hidden agenda on this in my writing. This is nonsense. In 1999 I found Hasnain’s claims about the eastern and central Himalayas melting away by 2035 sufficiently interesting, coming from a leading Indian glacioplogist after a four year study, to be newsworthy. I wrote the story. Some years later, I spoke to other glaciologists who seriously contested the claim and i did not repeat it after that, regarding it as at best unreliable. Then it turned up in the IPCC report. I presumed it must have been substantiated, and used it (attributed to IPCC) in a brief pre-Copenhagen roundup of climate science in the online Daily Telegraph. At that point glaciologists contacted me to point out both that it STILL wasn’t true and that my article may have been the starting point for the IPCC paragraph. As a conscientious journalist, I followed up the story and published in New Scientist. The Sunday Times picked up that story and everyone else picked up from them.
    I have no hidden agenda for or against the IPCC. Indeed, I exposed the scandal.

    Reply
  13. Editors

    Fred,

    at no point do we accuse you having a ‘hidden’ agenda. On the contrary, we say that your agenda is all too obvious, as is the New Scientist’s.

    Some years later, I spoke to other glaciologists who seriously contested the claim and i did not repeat it after that, regarding it as at best unreliable.

    Wasn’t that a story in itself: On the one hand, a scientist apparently claims that Himalayan glaciers will melt in decades, another says not? A scientific controversy worthy of reporting on, no?

    Since your article, however, you wrote two books on water shortages, and the social catastrophe that they will cause.

    The product description on the Amazon site for your book, When the Rivers Run Dry: What Happens When Our Water Runs Out? says that

    That we face a world-wide crisis is no idle threat. Pearce’s 15-year research into water issues has taken him all over the world. His vivid reportage reveals the personal stories behind failing rivers, barren fields, desertification, floods and water wars. His book gives a clear and terrifying picture of the consequences if no remedial action is taken, but also a brilliantly challenging explanation of the steps we must take to ensure the ‘blue revolution’ the world desperately needs.

    How can someone spend 15 years researching and writing about water, and not be aware of the status of the scientific claims relating to the water supply of possibly more than a billion Asians?

    Then it turned up in the IPCC report. I presumed it must have been substantiated, and used it (attributed to IPCC) in a brief pre-Copenhagen roundup of climate science in the online Daily Telegraph.

    So you did see the claim in the IPCC report, and yet you, a science journalist, and someone who had spent 15 years researching water security, didn’t think to investigate where the claim – that you had previously regarded as dubious, and controversial – had been substantiated, but decided to take at face value?

    That is what we are criticising, Fred. If the science fits the political narrative, obviously there’s not point in scrutinising it. That doesn’t speak about a hidden political agenda; it speaks about the way in which politics is prior to the science, in the arguments made throughout the debate, leading to the array of apocalyptic fantasies that it consists of now.

    Reply
  14. Donna Laframboise

    I, too, have no sympathy for Dr. Hasnain, the source of the glaciers-disappearing-by-2035 speculation.

    In early Dec. 2009, Time magazine ran an article titled “The Tragedy of the Himalayas.” The article is built around Dr. Hasnain.

    In that piece, he implies that, regardless of what his data collection efforts reveal, his mind is already made up: “‘The debate is over,’ he says. ‘We know the science. We see the threat. The time for action is now.'”

    I’ve written a lengthy blog post about the Time piece here, should anyone care to take a peek:

    http://nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com/2010/01/time-magazines-controversial-glacier.html

    Cheers!

    Reply
  15. Vinny Burgoo

    Four under-reported aspects of the Himalayan glacier controversy:

    1) The controversy isn’t new. Jack D. Ives complained in print about the 2035 claim in 2004. (A rejigged version of the relevant chapter of his book, _Himalayan misconceptions and distortions: What are the facts?_, was published in 2005 with the glorious strapline, ‘Himalayan Delusions: Who’s kidding who and why — Science at the service of media, politics and the development agencies’.) Professor Ives is a holder of the Patron’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, awarded in 2006 ‘For his role internationally in establishing the global importance of mountain regions’.

    2) ‘Scientific’ echoes of the 1999 CSE/NS claim that Himalayan glaciers were likely to disappear by 2035 appeared in ‘scientific’ print long before the IPCC’s 2007 AR4 report. Chief culprit: Dr M. Monirul Q. Mirza, who repeated the ‘gone by 2035’ and ‘500,000–>100,000 km2’ claims in articles or books published in 2002, 2005 and (pre-AR4) 2007. Dr Mirza was a co-ordinating lead author of TAR WG2’s Chapter 19 (Vulnerability), a contributing author to TAR WG2 Chapter 11 (Asia) and a drafting author of TAR WG2’s Summary for Policymakers; he was also a co-ordinating lead author of AR4 WG2’s Chapter 17 (Adaptation).

    3) Himalayan glaciers: ‘500,000–>100,000 km2’. The total area of Himalayan glaciers is about 35,000 km2 (Berthier, Shen etc.; and it’s mostly on the north slope). Drs Ahmad, Biswas, Mirza and all those echoing, clueless, hand-wringing NGOs – bak 2 skool. 500,000 km2 is an area 700 km by 700km. Geddit?

    4) Dr Hasnain’s claim that he was misrepresented by New Scientist’s Dr Fred Pearce. If you are still reading this blog, Dr Fred, you might like to know that Hasnain was still writing scare stories in the Indian press about this as recently as January 2006: ‘At present the rivers have shown 3-4% surplus water due to a 10% increase in the melting of the glacier of the western Himalayas, and a 30% increase in the eastern Himalayan glaciers. But, after 40 years, most of these glaciers will be wiped out and then South Asia will have water problems.’

    Reply
  16. Yarmy

    “Watershed: Collapse of Britain’s Water Supply”
    From 1982. Wonder how that’s panning out. Looking out my window, I’m suffering from something of a surplus.

    “The Coming Population Crash”
    That’s a relief. No need for David Attenburgh to worry then.

    Seriously, that’s a lot of books. Barbara Cartland, eat your heart out. I’m eagerly awaiting “Nothing Much To Worry About On The Horizon”.

    Reply
  17. Curious

    http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18420-climate-chief-admits-error-over-himalayan-glaciers.html

    Why would New Scientist allow Fred Pearce to write the new 21 January 2010 article about the Himalayan Glaciers disappearing?

    Why does Fred Pearce neglect to mention in the new 21 January 2010 by Fred Pearce New Scientist article that it was Fred Pearce who who wrote the 1999 NS article?

    Lots of other people got named by Fred Pearce, except Fred Pearce. I did a search for Pearce in the article in case my eye sight missed something.

    Not sure if you have checked out the following:
    http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/01/what-tangled-web-we-weave.html

    Reply
  18. Keith

    Yarmy: “Seriously, that’s a lot of books. Barbara Cartland, eat your heart out. I’m eagerly awaiting “Nothing Much To Worry About On The Horizon”.”

    No money in that Yarmy! A key strategy for finding the motivation of anything . . . “follow the money”

    Reply

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. The IPCC’s ‘Politically Correct’ Science » Climate Resistance - [...] in 2010, I had a look at an Oxfam report which claimed that, According to the IPCC, climate change…

Leave a Reply to geoffchambers Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.