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report (PDF) An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China that was not peer-reviewed.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
Build-A-Bear update:
… Our intention with the Polar Bear story was to inspire children, through the voices of our animal characters, to make a difference in their own individual ways. We did not intend to politicize the topic of global climate change or offend anyone in any way. The webisodes concluded this week with Santa successfully leaving on his journey to deliver gifts around the world. The webisodes will no longer be available on the site.
Politicize global climate change? No! Never happens. Telling little kiddies the North Pole is vanishing and Santa and the elves will be homeless, that’s not politics, that’s entertainment!
I think this is the referenced section of the IPCC, if you want to read it for yourselves.
http://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR4/SOD/Ch10.pdf
Now erratum – or would that be errata?
no glaciers in just 25 years…does that seem right?’
As long as they keep diverting the heat to the glaciers, there are going to be problems like these …
WARSAW – Ten people have died of cold in Poland over the past day, taking the toll since winter set in earlier this month to 79, police said Tuesday.
A glance at temperature fluctuations derived from Greenland ice cores shows that during the last five hundred million years it’s a series of sharp peaks much warmer than today followed by a sharp trough much colder than today. Technically speaking we are still in the last ice-age, ice-box earth, because we have polar ice caps. Gaia does not want this to continue. Through the mechanism of evolution She has raised up a species able to break this vicious cycle. That would be us. First with CO2, then deforestation, urban heat islands, soot, etc. We must fulfill our destiny returning earth to a lush, warm planet of plenty. Spread the word.
2035 or 2350? Mistake, possibly, but very convenient for grabbing headlines, while the correction appears on p41 in the advertisements. I wouldn’t put it past Fast Al and Company to do it on purpose knowing they could claim it’s just a typo, nothing to see here, move along!
UAH satellite data for mid-troposphere, covering most of the Himalayan highlands, shows practically no temp trend for these 30 years…………..
As always, the people who are not paid do all the work and get no credit. I appreciate all of the detective work that goes into helping educate myself and every skeptical person out there. The authors of these FREE blogs follow better protocol for citing sources and fact checking than any MSM.
Thank you Bloggers!
By the year 2035 they may well be advancing rather than retreating. Maybe even before that. Who knows? Maybe someone does, but certainly not Al Gore, Pachauri or the IPCC.
It’s time to complain to TV stations for advertising lies.
Great video by John Coleman posted here.
http://www.willisms.com/archives/2009/12/great_moments_i.html
Found somewhere on the Internet:
So it looks like someone did some creative data entry.
Oh, and there’s this.
I hear you brother. Aside from the damage all of this does to science, I am worried about the damage to legitimate pollution abatement/conservation efforts. The pendulum always swings too far either direction. Although it is beyond our capability to “save” the Earth (just look into the solar nuclear fuel cycle or do the math on NEOs. For however long we strange pink primates are at the top of the food chain, I think it best we not soil our cage and preserve our biosphere……
The only way to do that without mass murder is with technology and an increased standard of living for all-thus reduced birth rates. But where would that leave those who wish to be our masters? They are only good at telling us what we can’t do. They seem to fail to grasp their tenuous hold on things……ahh well hubris will do that to you. Nuclear pitch forks await.
Although I am relatively pessimistic, I do have some hope that at least we are aware of each other to some degree (thanks for the internet El Gordo) and perhaps we can realize how much we have in common and not allow ourselves to be divided against each other this time.
It all boils down to economics and ultimately money.
Time will tell.
Monty
Maybe not. From the posting above it appears the authors were all Asian – from Japan, Vietnam, India, Philippines, China. The Lead Authors were Yurji Anokhin (Russia), Punsalmaa Batima (Mongolia), Yasashi Honda (Japan)…
There are drawbacks to the “team approach”, among them the very real dangers of transcription errors. At the very least, they needed a good proofreader.
RE: my last ( yonason (22:18:34) : )
I seem to have entered the wrong URL. This is the correct one for the video of John Coleman. Sorry.
http://exileonthewing.wordpress.com/2009/12/21/valid-comment/
Read the article “By the way, there will still be glaciers in the Himalayas in 2035”.
Excellent sluething / investigative work.
Well done!
Most ironic – “The Indian environment ministry released a report in November by Vijay Kumar Raina that concluded that Himalayan glaciers on the whole were retreating, but not at an alarming rate or any faster than glaciers on the rest of the globe. According to The Guardian, countryman Rajenda Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, was furious. ”
Pachauri said the report was not “peer reviewed” and had few “scientific citations”.
And the IPCC report was not only not peer reviewed, it had NO scientific citations! NONE! The scientific study it was in all probabilty plagiarised from gave the date as 2350 and didnt say they would disappear even by then!
Pachauri “With the greatest of respect this guy retired years ago and I find it totally baffling that he comes out and throws out everything that has been established years ago.”
Established? By whom? The IPCC – out of thin air! Pachauri is accountable in more ways than one.
OOPS! last post was a response to:
Michael J. Bentley (20:35:16) :
Stinking wireless hookup lost connection during my post. fortunately I had it on the clipboard….without the quote for the original. I really have to learn to use html.
BTHW I’ve been a lurker here for a long time and really appreciate all of you!
Monty
One of my fav all time songs. Thanks for the memory.
And I thought (almost) that WWF was World Wrestling Federation until you spelled it out. I wonder what their global warming credentials are? 😉
Wathing the video in the post, the performers are up to their knees in CO2 or some other planet-destroying gas while singing about the far futue of mankind. Being a skeptic, I put it down to artistic effects instead of writing a pamphlet likening it to the end of the Mayan calendar.
The way I see it, peer reviewed or not, it’s all based on crap. After all, Michael Mann’s hockey stick was peer reviewed, right? Here is a little something that I think is appropriate in this context. It was written by the inimitable Paul Feyerabend back in 1975:
Enjoy.
Greg (22:39:02) :
And I thought (almost) that WWF was World Wrestling Federation until you spelled it out. I wonder what their global warming credentials are? 😉
Wrestling lost the lawsuit, thus it’s now WWE, World Wrestling Entertainment.
Although a merger to share the acronym would have been interesting. Hulk Hogan vs a giant panda during a fund-raising Wrestle-thon?
Not long ago there was a WWF report about sea levels rising a metre or more in the next ten years and causing the demise of many species of animals in Pacific islands.
It is simple enough to calculate that some 97,000 cubic miles of land based ice must melt to achieve this result. The total energy required is horrendous, it equates to a “forcing” of 0.75w/m^2. I was unable to discover a mechanism that could deliver this energy to Greenland and the Antarctic continent in the specified timescale.
I just read this report here;
http://moef.nic.in/downloads/public-information/MoEF%20Discussion%20Paper%20_him.pdf
I dont know whether its peer reviewed or not, but its made by
V.K. Raina
Ex. Deputy Director General
Geological Survey of India
And the conclusion os totally differnt from the IPCC / WWF conclusion. Its a long report, whit lots of stuff, but the conclusion at the end seems to me to be that the claciers shows a delayed reaction to the climate cycles the planet is experiencing. Not CO2 in particular, in other words.
If soot is a problem on the east side, then better living conditions for people in India and China surely is the cure.
And how to get better living conditions?
UN stathistics shows that democracy and free markeds is
the best way to go;
OT- Has anyone read this paper?
“Evidence for two intervals of enhanced 10Be deposition in Antarctic ice during the last glacial period”
G. M. Raisbeck, F. Yiou, D. Bourles, C. Lorius, J. Jouzel & N. I. Barkov
The notion of an unusually quiet sun for 1,000 to 2,000 years is fascinating.
Looking at this graph the times would coincide with periods of very cold temperatures and very dusty conditions (generally thought to be associated with cold/dry periods).
In fact, those two periods would coincide with the two coldest periods of the last glacial period.
Just wondering if it is worth the $35 bucks it would cost me to download the paper through the pay wall.
Wow. Just wow.
And the WWF report is cited in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retreat_of_glaciers_since_1850
I added a section under the talk page to address the use of the WWF as a supposed RS (Reliable Source) and the unreferenced claims in the Asia section such as: “In India the Gangotri Glacier, which is a significant source of water for the Ganges River…” which is contradicted by scientist Kireet Kumar:
“Our data indicate the Ganges results primarily from monsoon rainfall, and until the monsoon fails completely, there will be a Ganges river, very similar to the present river.” Glacier melt contributes 3% to 4% of the Ganges’s annual flow, says Kireet Kumar.”
We’ll see what the gatekeepers allow.