The UK's Times is reporting that United Nations' IPCC is likely to retract their alarmist claims that the Himalayas' glaciers are melting.
From the article by Jonathan Leake and Chris Hastings:
"A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.
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.
"It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
"Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was 'speculation' and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.
"Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said he would recommend that the claim about glaciers be dropped: 'If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, than I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments.'"
Junk science, telephone interviews, misinterpretations, and alarmist notions... that is what's driving the world's environmental policies. Great...
Monday, January 18, 2010
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ReplyDeleteSorry about the previous deletion--serious typo.
ReplyDeleteIt's even worse than they're letting on.
The original source for the 2035 date so enthusiastically published and disseminated by the IPCC came from a date erroneously transcribed from a single article by a guy named Kotlyakov, in which he hypothesized the future date of the Himalayan glacial melt as 2335, not 2035--a difference of a mere 300 years!
These Mann-caused global warming alarmists were willing to put the entire world into a sweat based on one estimate, with no follow up, no checking of data, and no copy-editing, even though the 2035 date is in complete disagreement with the results of documented evidence provided by on-site measurements that show the slowing of the recession of 4 of the 5 major Himalayan glaciers.
Now, I ask you, if someone told you that the Himalayan glaciers were going to melt in the next couple of decades, would you ask to read the research? --Don't answer. Without ever having met you, I know that you would.
This kind of so-called "scholarship" makes me crazy.
Here's the citation: Kotlyakov, V.M., 1996, The future of glaciers under the expected climate warming, 61-66, in Kotlyakov, V.M., ed., 1996, Variations of Snow and Ice in the Past and at Present on a Global and Regional Scale, Technical Documents in Hydrology, 1. UNESCO, Paris (IHP-IV Project H-4.1.
So a copy-editing error and a telephone interview based solely on speculation is the kind of evidence the UN finds to be sufficient...
ReplyDelete"This kind of so-called 'scholarship' makes me crazy."
Not to be a downer, but I find this to be well along the norm in academia. In the areas I'm most acquainted with (English, narrative theory, literary criticism, and a smattering of linguistics) it's ridiculous how isolated from reality the faculty tend to be.
Mann and the alarmists stand to gain a great deal of money. They hide behind the respectability of academia-- a trick that won't work for much longer as more and more people discover the intellectual dregs and laziness that make up so much of higher education at this point.
It's sad, but it can be rectified. In fact, I'm under the opinion that academia can't help but be readjusted relatively soon since what essentially is a con-game can only last for so long.