Glacier Scientist: I Knew Data Hadn't Been Verified
The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.
Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.
In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries
in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can
highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage
them to take some concrete action.
‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.
Dr Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furore over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.
According to the IPCC’s statement of principles, its role is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis, scientific,
technical and socio-economic information – IPCC reports should be
neutral with respect to policy’.
The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further
investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF.
It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source.
The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121.
Last Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’.
Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it
was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by
any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which
it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’
In fact, the 2035 melting date seems to have been plucked from thin air.
Tags: deliberate, global, ipcc, lies, warming
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Fang1944 on -
From Scientific American:
The village of Brep in Pakistan doesn't exist in the same place anymore. That's because a torrential flood forced the community to move after a lake formed by glacial meltwater burst its bounds and leveled the town.
Glacial lake outbursts have become a yearly occurrence across the high mountain region stretching from Afghanistan to Bhutan sometimes called the Roof of the World.
Such floods are now common because temperatures in this high mountain region are rising even faster than those at lower elevations. A rise in altitude of 2,000 meters equals a tripling in the increase of average temperatures. As a result, many Himalayan, Hindu Kush and Karakoram glaciers are dwindling.
Yet, predictions of the glaciers imminent demise may have been premature. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change famously predicted they could disappear as soon as 2035. It turns out that guesstimate was based on misquoting a researcher in a 1999 news article—not a result from any kind of peer-reviewed scientific study.
The incident reflects a breakdown in the IPCC process but it doesn't undercut the reality that glacier loss, particularly in what are technically tropical regions such as the Andes and Himalayas, continues to accelerate in the 21st century. Though they likely won't disappear entirely for centuries, losing the glaciers will eventually be bad news for the billions around the world who rely on meltwater to survive.
—David Biello
And take a look at Glacier National Park sometime. It's nothing compared to what it was in the 60s. In Greenland people can see the glaciers shrinking. Italy and Switzerland are having to re-draw their borders because the glaciers are melting.
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Permalink Reply by Van on -
As Fang points out there is no peer reviewed scientific studies showing the glaciers may be gone by 2035, but they're still melting at an alarming rate. In fact many of the global warming events that are happening now were originally predicted to happen much later in this century. Like the melting of polar ice.
http://climateprogress.org/2010/01/04/the-year-in-climate-science-s...
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Permalink Reply by Van on
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Her's some more for you:
http://climateprogress.org/2009/05/08/bolivia-chacaltaya-glacier-gone/
http://climateprogress.org/2009/08/13/west-antarctic-ice-sheet-pine...
http://climateprogress.org/2009/08/08/de-icer-usgs-report-details-%...
http://climateprogress.org/2009/03/03/global-warming-impact-faster-...
http://climateprogress.org/2009/01/30/world%E2%80%99s-glaciers-shri...
They have before and after pictures Too.
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Permalink Reply by Fang1944 on
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And read about melting glaciers in Greenland in National Geographic.
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Permalink Reply by Fang1944 on
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Everybody should at least read the review of James Hansen's Storms of My Grandchildren.
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Permalink Reply by Hillbilly on -
And once you're done with that I highly recommend this review of James Hansen's Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs . Let's just say, if true, we're in for bigger sht than you can imagine.
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