[ExI] IPCC investgates their own glacier forecast

[Damien Broderick]

Tuesday, 19 January 2010
Agence France-Presse



PARIS, NEW DELHI: The U.N.'s panel of climate scientists said they will 
investigate claims its own doomsday prediction for the disappearance of 
Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is mistaken.

In 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate 
Change (IPCC) warned that glaciers in the Himalayas were receding faster 
than in any other part of the world and could "disappear altogether by 
2035 if not sooner".

At the weekend, Britain's Sunday Times newspaper reported that this 
reference came from the green campaign group WWF, which in turn took it 
from a magazine interview given by an Indian glaciologist in 1999.

There is no evidence that the claim was published in a peer-reviewed 
journal, a cornerstone of scientific credibility, it said.

"We are looking into the issue of the Himalayan glaciers, and will take 
a position on it in the next two or three days," the IPCC's chairman, 
Rajendra Pachauri said.

The Sunday Times reported that the IPCC was likely to retract the 
figure, which would be a humiliation and a further boost for climate 
sceptics after a scandal last month dubbed 'climategate'.

Emails from scientists at Britain's University of East Anglia, a top 
centre for climate research, were leaked and seized on by sceptics last 
month as evidence that experts twisted data in order to dramatise global 
warming.

Some of the thousands of messages expressed frustration at the 
scientists' inability to explain what they described as a temporary 
slowdown in warming.

A leading glaciologist who contributed to the Fourth Assessment Report 
described the mistake as huge and said he had notified his colleagues of 
it in late 2006, months before publication.

Loss of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 would take two or three times the 
highest expected rate of global warming, said Georg Kaser of the 
Geography Institute at Austria's University of Innsbruck.

"This number is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of 
magnitude. It is as wrong as can be wrong.

"To get this outcome, you would have to increase the ablation [ice loss] 
by 20 fold. You would have to raise temperatures by at least 12 degrees 
[Celsius]."

"It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing ... I pointed it out."
Asked why his warning had not been heeded, Kaser pointed to "a kind of 
amateurism" among experts from the region who were in charge of the 
chapter on climate impacts, where the reference appeared.

"They might have been good hydrologists or botanists, but they were 
without any knowledge in glaciology," he said.

The Fourth Assessment Report said that the evidence for global warming 
was now "unequivocal", that the chief source for it was man-made and 
that there were already signs of climate change, of which glacial melt 
was one.

The massive publication had the effect of a political thunderclap, 
triggering promises to curb greenhouse gases that had stoked the problem.

Kaser said the core evidence of the Fourth Assessment Report remained 
incontrovertible.

Fears of more "IPCC bashing"

"I am careful in saying this, because immediately people will again 
engage in IPCC bashing, which would be wrong," he said.

But he acknowledged that the process of peer review, scrutiny and 
challenge, which underpin the IPCC's reputation had "entirely failed" 
when it came specifically to the 2035 figure.

The 2035 reference appeared in the second volume of the Fourth 
Assessment Report, a tome published in April 2007 that focussed on the 
impacts of climate change, especially on human communities.

Part of the problem, said Kaser, was "everyone was focussed" on the 
first volume, published in February 2007, which detailed the physical 
science for climate change.

Work on this volume was "much more attractive to the community" of 
glaciologists, and they had failed to pick up on the mistake that 
appeared in the second, he said.

The question of glacial melt is a vital one for South Asia, as it 
touches on flooding or water stress with the potential to affect 
hundreds of millions of lives.

Indian scientists are split on how fast Himalayan glaciers are receding 
and whether or not climate change is responsible for this. Environment 
Minister Jairam Ramesh has repeatedly challenged the IPCC's claims, 
saying there is no "conclusive scientific evidence" linking global 
warming to the melting of glaciers.