glaciergate
Himalayan glaciers melting at 'exceptional rate'
Date:December 20, 2021Source:University of LeedsSummary:The accelerating melting of the Himalayan glaciers threatens the water supply of millions of people in Asia, new research warns. The study concludes that over recent decades the Himalayan glaciers have lost ice ten times more quickly over the last few decades than on average since the last major glacier expansion 400-700 years ago, a period known as the Little Ice Age....Dr Jonathan Carrivick, corresponding author and Deputy Head of the University of Leeds School of Geography, said: "Our findings clearly show that ice is now being lost from Himalayan glaciers at a rate that is at least ten times higher than the average rate over past centuries. This acceleration in the rate of loss has only emerged within the last few decades, and coincides with human-induced climate change."
The Himalayan mountain range is home to the world's third-largest amount of glacier ice, after Antarctica and the Arctic and is often referred to as 'the Third Pole'.
The acceleration of melting of Himalayan glaciers has significant implications for hundreds of millions of people who depend on Asia's major river systems for food and energy. These rivers include the Brahmaputra, Ganges and Indus.
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ipcc 2007
Z.2005.01-16
Letter to Senator McCain
Scientists Dispute Sensational Claims of Arctic Ice Melt
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“Eleven distinguished[ 690 ]scientists, most of whom specialize in climatology [691]
,...ball, lupo, legates, michaels, roy spencer, willie soon, baliunas sallie...
on November 16 published an open letter to Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who
has repeatedly sponsored congressional legislation that mirrors the Kyoto
Protocol, which was rejected by the U.S. Senate in 1997 by a vote of 95-0. The
letter disputes assertions by McCain and other alarmists that the Arctic climate is
undergoing remarkable and catastrophic climate change. At the right are excerpts
from the text of the letter.
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onearth
...The likes of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page stepped delightedly into the vacuum of real reporting. Well, we said, in another bout of complacency, we can always rely on 20-year climate veteran Andy Revkin at the New York Times. Not any longer, and in fact the rot had set in even before he took the *Times* buyout in December and limited himself to his still-indispensable blog.
The Climategate e-mail "scandal," which erupted on the eve of the Copenhagen climate talks, was the first symptom of the problem. For frustrated editors, here was something new and different, and it was given prominent and prolonged play in the New York Times. In substantive terms, Climategate changed nothing, as my NRDC colleague Dan Lashof pointed out in an excellent blog. But as they say in the biz, the story had legs, and it clearly clouded the debate in Copenhagen and gave fresh energy to the opponents of climate legislation in Washington.
Now comes a front-page story on February 9 by Revkin's successor, Elizabeth Rosenthal, headlined "Skeptics Find Fault With U.N. Climate Panel."
Others have gone into the failings of this article from the point of view of journalistic integrity, pointing out correctly that it does not include comment from one single climate scientist but instead offers a platform to... well, it would be polite to call them "climate skeptics." Lunatic fringe of climate deniers would be more accurate, such as Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, who famously compared NGO demonstrators in Copenhagen to the Hitlerjugend. So I'll do no more than direct you to Joseph Romm's comprehensive critique of Rosenthal's piece on Grist, which among other things suggests that readers write to the Times' public editor, or ombudsman, Clark Hoyt , at public@nytimes.com, to request a serious analysis of the newspaper's recent coverage of climate issues.
Let me focus instead on the actual content of Rosenthal's story—the specific critique of the IPCC's scientific predictions and Pachauri's purported conflicts of interest. Both involve India, and both were topics that I wrote about in my Summer 2009 cover story for OnEarth.
The first concerns the rate of the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers. The 2007 IPCC fourth assessment report included an estimate that "if the present rate [of melting] continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high (IPCC-speak for 90 percent-plus likely) if the earth keeps warming at the current rate." That assessment was based on an interview that India's leading glaciologist, Syad Iqbal Hasnain, had given to Fred Pearce of the New Scientist magazine in 1999.
Rosenthal herself had earlier reported on criticisms of this assertion in the New York Times, in the immediate aftermath of the Copenhagen conference.Within 24 hours the IPCC acknowledged that citing that figure had been a lapse in its customary review standards.
The IPCC is absolutely right to maintain the highest standards in its internal scientific review procedures. But how significant was the error? Over the past decade, Hasnain has introduced some nuances into his predictions of glacier melt. When I interviewed him in New Delhi last March, he told me that, "If the current trends continue, within 30 to 40 years most of the glaciers will melt out." Some of the difficulty in being more precise, he said, has to do with the fact that so much of the affected region in India, Pakistan and Tibet is off-limits to researchers for national security reasons.But the change in his predictions is simply stated: most of the glaciers are very likely to be gone by 2040 to 2050, rather than all the glaciers are very likely to be gone by 2035.If I were one of the 1.5 billion people in Asia whose survival will be threatened by the disappearance of the Himalayan ice, I think I'd characterize the change between those two predictions as a decline from "absolutely catastrophic" to "truly horrendous."
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https://theconversation.com/two-thirds-of-glacier-ice-in-the-himalayas-will-be-lost-by-2100-if-climate-targets-arent-met-143207
In the world of glaciology, the year 2007 would go down in history. It was the year a seemingly small error in a major international report heralded huge changes in our understanding of what was happening to the Himalayan glaciers.
Just one year after Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth sparked conversations about anthropogenic (human-made) global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its 4th Assessment Report. This state-of-the-science summary was the gold standard to inform the world about climate change. The report contained one small but serious error – that all glaciers in the Himalayas would vanish by the year 2035.
The scandal sparked a flurry of new research, including my own, and we can now see that some Himalayan glaciers will survive into the next century. The latest data tells us that if we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, then between one-third and one-half of glacier ice will be lost by 2100. If not, and we carry on with business as usual, then two-thirds of Himalayan glaciers will vanish by the end of this century....
...New research shows that the rate at which glacier ice is lost from the Himalaya has doubled in the last 20 years and is similar to the rate of ice loss globally. Although extreme altitudes were thought to protect glaciers from climate change, we now know that high mountains are warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet....
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Press Releases
Glaciergate: More Scientific Fraud: "Botched" - "Riddled with Errors" - "Panel got it wrong"
January 21, 2010 -
Posted by: David Lungren David_Lungren@epw.senate.gov
Glaciergate: More Scientific Fraud
"Botched" - "Riddled with Errors" - "Panel got it wrong"
"Five glaring errors were discovered in one paragraph of the world's most authoritative report on global warming"
Inhofe EPW News Round-Up
USA Today : U.N. apologizes for botched climate prediction-United Nations climate panel chiefs apologized Wednesday for a botched projection of all Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035. In an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change statement, group chairman Rajendra Pachauri and other officials acknowledged "poorly substantiated rates 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."
AP: Riddled with Errors WASHINGTON - Five glaring errors were discovered in one paragraph of the world's most authoritative report on global warming, forcing the Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists who wrote it to apologize and promise to be more careful. The errors are in a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N.-affiliated body. All the mistakes appear in a subsection that suggests glaciers in the Himalayas could melt away by the year 2035 - hundreds of years earlier than the data actually indicates. The year 2350 apparently was transposed as 2035.
TIME: Himalayan Melting: How a Climate Panel Got It Wrong - The mistake is a black eye for the IPCC and for the climate science community as a whole. Climate scientists are still dealing with the Climategate controversy, which involved hacked e-mails from a major British climatology center that cast doubt on the solidity of evidence for global warming. It's still not clear exactly how the error made it into the IPCC's assessment, though climate scientists point out that the total document was thousands of pages long and that the Himalaya claim wasn't included in the summary of the report, which was boiled down for policymakers and received the most attention from reviewers. "Honest mistakes do happen," admits Benjamin Santer, a climate modeler at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "The bulk of the science is clear and compelling and rests on multiple lines of evidence," not just one case.
Investor's Business Daily: The IPCC's Abominable Snowmen - A U.N. warning that Himalayan glaciers were melting fast and may be gone by 2035 was not backed up by science, U.N. climate experts admitted. The scientists who said that Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035 have admitted the claim has as much credibility as sightings of the mythical Yeti. It's their fraudulent claims that are melting away. We hesitate to call it Glacier-gate, but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. body tasked with scaring us to death about global warming, has admitted that the claim in its 2007 report about the Himalayan glaciers disappearing was not based on any scientific study or research. It was instead based on one scientist's speculation in a telephone interview with a reporter.
FoxNews: Claims Melting Away - The world's most famous climate change expert is in the midst of a massive controversy, as the leading environmental science institute he heads scrambled to explain data it promulgated for a U.N. report. One of the key elements in the growing scandal is the revelation that IPCC based some of its public proclamations on non-peer reviewed reports."The data, all the data, needs to come to light," says Dr. Jane M. Orient, president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness and an outspoken skeptic on climate change.
The Economist: Off-base camp - The idea that the Himalaya could lose its glaciers by 2035-glaciers which feed rivers across South and East Asia-is a dramatic and apocalyptic one. After the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said such an outcome was very likely in the assessment of the state of climate science that it made in 2007, onlookers (including this newspaper) repeated the claim with alarm. In fact, there is no reason to believe it to be true. This is good news (within limits) for Indian farmers-and bad news for the IPCC.
Bloomberg: UN Study Erred on Glacier Size, Melting Rate, Scientists Say - A single paragraph in the United Nations' most comprehensive report on climate change contains three factual errors, scientists said. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, said in the 2007 report that Himalayan glaciers are receding faster than elsewhere when they are not, overestimated the area covered by the Asian ice masses by a factor of 15 and said they may shrink four-fifths by 2035 rather than 2350, four researchers said in a letter to the journal Science. "These errors could have been avoided had the norms of scientific publication, including peer review and concentration upon peer-reviewed work, been respected," the researchers based in the U.S., Canada and Austria wrote.
E & E News - Climate science panel apologizes for Himalayan error - Jeffrey Kargel, an adjunct professor at Arizona State University 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," he said. Kargel is one of four scientists who addressed the issue in a letter that will be published in the Jan. 29 issue of the journal Science. "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.
WSJ: Claim on Glaciers Under Fire - "The IPCC report said Himalayan glaciers are receding faster than anywhere else in the world and that's not correct," said J. Graham Cogley, a professor of geography at Trent University in Ontario. Dr. Cogley is a glaciologist who contributed to another part of the 2007 IPCC report and is one of the first people to track down some of the inconsistencies in the section on Himalayan glaciers. He added that the 2035 date was also likely wrong. "There's a failure to review this data adequately by qualified experts," Prof. Cogley said.
The Australian - UN's IPCC says sorry for glacier error - The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said yesterday the prediction in its landmark 2007 report was "poorly substantiated" and resulted from a lapse in standards. "In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly," the panel said. "The chair, vice-chair and co-chairs of the IPCC regret the poor application of IPCC procedures in this instance." The stunning admission is certain to embolden critics of the panel, which is already under fire over a separate scandal last year involving stolen emails that mentioned suppressing data to freeze out climate change sceptics.
Sydney Morning Herald: Claims on glaciers not backed up - CLAIMS that Himalayan glaciers could melt entirely by 2035 were poorly researched and should have faced greater scrutiny before appearing in the United Nations benchmark study on climate change, the world's top climate officials have conceded. After a week of criticism over the validity of the 2035 claim, the UN's top climate group - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - conceded the estimate was not backed by the standards of evidence the group required.
Montreal Gazette: UN panel 'regrets' exaggeration - The UN panel of climate scientists expressed regret yesterday for exaggerating how quickly Himalayan glaciers are melting in a report that wrongly projected that they could all vanish by 2035. Leaders of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) "regret the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures in this instance," they said in a statement about the flaw in a paragraph of a 938-page scientific repor
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