Even though these clean cut dudes (by today’s standards) may be favorite sons of 60’s alarmism, at least they can add years correctly. Their signature song telling tales of doom in future years is pretty close to this issue, so it seemed appropriate.
John Nielsen-Gammon who is the state climatologist for Texas has found a serious error in the IPCC AR4.
Roger Pielke Sr. reports that “he has published an effective summary and further detailed analysis of the error Madhav Khandkkar reported on in a guest weblog Global Warming And Glacier Melt-Down Debate: A Tempest In A Teapot?” – A Guest Weblog By Madhav L Khandekar.”
The story from Nielsen-Gammon is on the Houston Chronicle website, and is titled By the way, there will still be glaciers in the Himalayas in 2035
It seems IPCC made a serious error in judgement, and violated their own rules. The mistake was relying on a flawed report from WWF for a key piece of information. This turns out to be a World Wildlife Fund project report (PDF) An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China that was not peer-reviewed.
This is a problem; the IPCC is supposed to rely only on the peer-reviewed literature. Gee, where have we heard that before?
The key error is in this sentence on page 29 of the WWF report:
“glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the livelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 is very high”.
Remember that year, 2035, as you read on.
Excerpts:
“Lost amid the news coverage of Copenhagen and Climategate was the assertion that one of the more attention-grabbing statements of the IPCC AR4 was flat-out wrong: [the IPCC text is]
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).”(IPCC AR4 WG2 Ch10, p. 493).”
“To recap, the available evidence indicates that the IPCC authors of this section relied upon a secondhand, unreferreed source which turned out to be unreliable, and failed to identify this source. As a result, the IPCC has predicted the likely loss of most or all of Himalaya’s glaciers by 2035 with apparently no peer-reviewed scientific studies to justify such a prediction and at least one scientific study (Kotlyakov) saying that such a disappearance is too fast by a factor of ten!”
To see how that year of 2035 figures in, read the complete report here: By the way, there will still be glaciers in the Himalayas in 2035
Is there any statement about AGW by the IPCC, WWF, Greenpeace, East Anglia, GISS, the NOAA, NWS (of UK, US, NZ, Aus, or Spain) that has been actually “proven true” and “scientifically accurate” in the last 15 years?
This is the same whacko mentality that is shown in creativebits.org . This is a list of photographs (stills) used in environmental campaigns. Scroll 2/3 down and you will see an Armadillo in a lounge room and underneath “If you don’t preserve nature by switching off your TV, who will”.
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
It, like the report, is a visceral scare campaign pretending to have a basis in science.
Seems to me….
I really don’t have a problem in exposing the nitwits who thought they could control the world – lets say in their underwear (please no nude shots – some of these guys shouldn’t be seen in spandex). BUT….
We do need to support clean activites (EG removing soot from stack gasses)
There are lots of efficient and cost effective ways of keeping crap out of the atmosphere and world – and third world counties need to employ them – and can with a “””little””” help from the rest of us, like in-kind engineering help. I wouldn’t give money any more than giving a street person cash instead of a non-negotiable voucher for a meal at a local diner or some such. Send qualified consultants to assist.
None of us (I hope) is in favor of energy use for use sake, or pollution because we can. Anthony drives an electric car to work – cool, but here in Colorado, that just wouldn’t work at the moment – so I drive my mid-sized SUV at 20 mpg. When the tide turns, and it will I think, we need to get that message out. We can have a clean environment, but we need to follow the FACTS not some nitwit control scheme.
Mike
A dog is twice as bad as an SUV.
Pets are horrible things for the environment. They are destroying our planet. We should immediately get rid of them.
Notify the WWF, to save the planet the pandas and the polar bears at the zoos need to be put down!
And the koalas as well!
Jack Simmons (20:22:12) :
IPCC must have had the same fact checkers as Al Gore when he claim the earth’s temperature under the ground was in the millions.
Fahrenheit, Centigrade, or perhaps was that the Kelvin scale?
Crosspatch!
I fully agree.WWF propaganda is of the lowest kind.Bears killing and eating cubs is natural behavior its common among ALL big predators Lions asf.
WWF are activist in taking belife of the future away from our kids, and for no other reason to fill thier own pockets.They are preditors of our childrens innocens och empathy.
There are so many pure lies in this propaganda so they should be sued fore fraud.The Icebear population is stable and been so since the middle of the eighties. The population is held under control by hunting.In Svalbard where hunting is forbidden the population is growing.Notice that Svalbard is the icebear habitat that has “suffered” of the biggest “lost” of ice of all habitats.
So I hate all this lies! Our children should instead be encouraged to know that the Icebear population was down to 5000 individuals in the beginning of the seventies and has grown to 20-25.000 by hunting banns and held under control by hunting since then.The inuites has stil the right to hunt icebears and arranges huntingtrips where the hunters pay 30.000 $ for a bear.
To be an Icebear is an risky buissiness but there is absolutly no evidence what so ever that “globalwarming” is a problem for the bear.The indication is the other way around.On the contrary the coldest areas have the populations that has shown a small decline.WWF claims to be “scientific” thats probably true when it comes to steeling childrens belif in the future. But when it comes to enviromental “science” its pathetic.
The hole enviromental activist industri is driven by misantrophy.Children are filantropes and easy victims.
Slightly OT, but speaking of commercials.
I saw a bizarre EXXON commercial during Monday Night Football. The spot opens with a scientist (or an actor, who knows) saying that while natural gas was a cleaner burning fuel, some natural gas contained impurities like CO2. I played it back (DVR) several times to make sure I understood.
CO2 is now an impurity in some natural gases.
You can’t make this stuff up.
George Turner (20:14:03) :
Yes, the Polar Bears have discovered what Yosemite Bears have known all along: You can be fruitful and multiply at the town dump.
2035 doesn’t even come close to the ‘build-a-bear’ site listed above by Adam from Kansas. Apparently the north Pole will be gone by tomorrow unless the kiddies do something or other to save it (couldn’t watch any longer as I vomited a bit into my mouth).
Cheers
Michael
REPLY: That’s our next WUWT story, coming up in a couple of hours – Anthony
Three impertinent questions:
1. who were the reviewers for this section of IPCC AR4?
2. even if they “forgot” to demand a primary source for this stunning claim, did they also forget how to do a sanity check on it? Seriously, that much ice melting in the next 25 years is going to create prodigious contributions to some downstream rivers. Did anyone check to see if they calculated rate of loss of ice is corroborated by a corresponding increase water flow, to corroborate this stunning claim? If they didn’t independently seek out a primary source for this claim, and didn’t do a sanity check, what on earth DID they do that constitutes “fact checking”?
3. Were the reviewers paid to perform their reviews? If so, they should be sued for fraud.
Just how bad is this?
Well, think of it this way: if the IPCC was your pharmacist, they just buggered the dosage of your medication, and you just swallowed ten times the prescribed dose of your meds.
No big deal, except you will probably be dead.
And these are the people who we are supposed to believe when it comes to the definitive conclusions about climate change and its effects on the planet.
IPCC needs an independent audit with a fine-toothed comb before I believe anything they say.
From the opening scenes of the video, looks like there’s a CO2 count of around 200,000 ppm in the year 2525! Has anyone told Al Gore?
Is the quote sic? (“livelihood” vs. “likelihood”)
glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the livelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 is very high”.
From that song 2525 by Zager and Evans
…In the year 3535,
aint gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie
Everything you think, do and say
is in the pill you took today….
I guess the global warmers have taken it to heart
The WWF is in a deal with the UN where they’re trying to get international law to award soveriegnty over seamounts outside EEZ’s to WWF, making WWF a nation, and giving it the authority to tax fishing boats that fish on these international seamounts.
Why is this not front page news everywhere.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/23/2779498.htm?section=justin
Whenever I run into others who are not well educated on the GW issue, they always respond to me with “What about the glaciers and polar ice caps?. How do you explain those?” I think we clearly need to have a campaign that explains to the masses that skeptics are skeptical of claims of man-made or CO2 caused warming, not warming in general. Otherwise were going to continue to hear MSM claims (including this garbage from the IPCC) that the world’s ice is melting, melting, melting……………….and mankind is guilty!
MidwestGreen (20:08:05) : “…Cap and Trade does not stop any pollution(;) it just allows for a large wealth transfer-from us to them.”
The Cap and Traders want to destroy America.
On Build A Bear, I sent the following email directly to them:
Impossible! It was peer reviewed!
tpinlb (20:18:12) :
I think if you check the history of WWF, you will find that they started up with a genuine desire to protect animal species in Africa and Asia that were being decimated by poachers. At one time, certainly, they sponsored a number of biologists doing fieldwork.
This was the time when the British Royals got involved.
Conservation groups tend to have a social structure rather than a hierarchical one. It is a sharing and supportive environment, where people are united by a common cause.
On the down-side, their structure permitted most of the european conservation organizations to become deeply infiltrated by militant greens from eastern europe, following the collapse of the USSR.
Socialism (or Communism) is the only political system they really understand (and trust), and Democracy (and Capitalism) have always been the enemy – it was the way they were brought up and educated.
So although borders move, and regimes change, for them, the fight goes on.
Conservation, and climate change, are only means to an end. We are now starting to get a glimmer of what their desired “end” might be.
It is the political fight that is important. I am sorry to say that the science that is dear to the hearts of most people on this blog, is only a side-show in the bigger story.
A very good short article describing the Science issue: Laws vs Models
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2009/12/21/the_perverse_economics_of_climate_modeling_97559.html
WWF like any single issue non-profit is going to be alarmist in order to raise funds. That’s why they make unsubstantiated claims about the number of species going extinct, to raise money.
RC has a new post titled
Unforced variations — Open thread for various climate science-related discussions. Suggestions for potential future posts are welcome.
I posted the following, as a suggestion for a potential future post 🙂 Y’all might want to suggest it too!!!
“I don’t know, how about this topic? Something y’all can really whack around like a pinata for egregious failure to peer review!
In the case of melting glaciers in the Himalayas, the IPCC 2035 claim has led to, in Nielsen-Gammen’s words, an egregious mistake becoming “effectively common knowledge that the glaciers were going to vanish by 2035.” Like the common (but wrong) knowledge on disasters and climate change that originated in the grey literature and was subsequently misrepresented by the IPCC, on the melting of Himalayan glaciers the IPCC has dramatically misled policy makers and the public.”
Mike Lorrey-
I couldn’t help but laugh with your post. How is the WWF going to enforce the tax, build a fleet of pirate ships? WWF courts? WWF prisons?
RE: Commercials (20:41:49) :
“I saw a bizarre EXXON commercial during Monday Night Football. The spot opens with a scientist (or an actor, who knows) saying that while natural gas was a cleaner burning fuel, some natural gas contained impurities like CO2. I played it back (DVR) several times to make sure I understood.
CO2 is now an impurity in some natural gases.”
Yes, CO2 in natural gas is an impurity just like water in gasoline … you can’t burn it, but you’re paying for it.