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report (PDF) An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China that was not peer-reviewed.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
PUTTING ICEBERGS TO GOOD USE
If the WWF wants to be in show biz, where its all about a fictional story line, they should go to being the World Wrestling Federation!
Monckton has given many examples where data within the report was adjusted by an order of magnitude in the SPM. This appears to be an extension of that practice.
Michael In Sydney (19:46:56) :
2035 instead of 2350…Reminds me of the guys at NASA or JPL working on the Mars Climate Orbiter who had the metric/imperial mix up.
It is funny that people didn’t think ‘hold on, no glaciers in just 25 years…does that seem right?’ People seem to have lost their common-sense reference point when it comes to climate.
——–
And a number of other things, I would like to add.
WWF and GreenPeace are funded by rockefeller, the supposed FOE. It is insane… the truly dreaded humans, those that manipulate, play on all sides. They are intertwined so they win no matter… well, until we expose them.
I love wildlife, and I, and my children, respect living beings. We don’t consider humans as the king of the planet, only ONE species–the most destructive and abusive, by far, as we surely know.
We need to live in harmony with nature and all its beings… Then, and only then, will we move forward. This PLANET is AMAZING and we should be sure we do keep it that way… Let’s prove we are the most intelligent beings.
Don’t get me wrong from the above post…. I love CO2, but hate pollution, manipulators and thieves.
That is what happens when you “extra-polate” too much.
Statistics can be fun. Obviously they were having fun when extrapolating from recent glacier trends and hundreds of years into the future, to the year 2350….
Which reminds me that in Norway there is a humorous story on statistics based on actual data from our Central Bureau of Statistics. The data showed that young men doing military service in 1977 were on average 179cm tall and the average height increasing significantly each year. When extrapolating the measured trend back to the famous Viking battle of Stiklestad http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stiklestad in the year 1030, it was found that the soldiers back then had been on average 29cm tall. 🙂
The story was told by author and humorist Kjell Aukrust, brother of the lead scientist of the Central Bureau of Statistics (Statistisk Sentralbyrå). It is still referred to on their website
http://www.ssb.no/emner/03/00/sa94/del-v-1b.pdf
crosspatch (22:22:11) :
Found somewhere on the Internet:
According to Prof Graham Cogley (Trent University, Ontario), a short article on the future of glaciers by a Russian scientist (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). 78p estimates 2350 as the year for disappearance of glaciers, but the IPCC authors misread 2350 as 2035 in the Official IPCC documents, WGII 2007 p. 493!
So it looks like someone did some creative data entry.
I tried to check up on this in the official IPCC documents via their front page http://www.ipcc.ch/
I can’t access the AR4 WG2 document, others work ok
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/contents.html
The requested URL /publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/contents.html was not found on this server.
Apache/2.0.52 (CentOS) Server at http://www.ipcc.ch Port 80
The WWF is a purchased front group for Western European government policy decisions, hidden by the appearance of charity and environmentalism. The EU’s “you control the climate” P.R. campaign is engendered to usurp the UN’s role as arbiter of the value of global carbon credits and allocation of moneys supposedly going to the undeveloped world, one crook taking over another’s turf.
once an organisation, grows to a certain level, it becomes a organism, with feedback loops, all there to feed and make it grow. The WWF Used to be to help, now its a power in itself, and it pushes these things to make itself grow.
Another example of the lack of critical review of IPCC publications. Time for a complete reconsideration of the established science. Time out!
>>>I have not seen such pure falsehood in a commercial in a
>>>very long time. It was worse than wrong, it was harmful.
If you are in the UK, make a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority – not sure if the USA has an equivalent. I have sent in ten complaints this year. They will eventually get the message that these adverts are unacceptable.
.
[snip – just a bit over the top, sorry]
.
>>>What took you so long? Even the BBC reported
>>>this weeks ago:
>>> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8387737.stm
Correction, the BBC did NOT ‘report’ this story.
The BBC is a television company, and I did not see this report on the television, despite watching every BBC World and BBC News report for the last two weeks.
What they did is fairly standard nowadays. If there is anything in the news that is anti-Green, anti-Multiculturalism, or anti-Warming, the BBC bury it in an obscure web page. That way they can always say ‘we did report this – we are a balanced media outlet’ – but only five people ever get to see the report, and the BBC’s propaganda objectives continue undimmed.
The BBC has to be closed down for good.
.
ralph (15:21:09) :
>>>I have not seen such pure falsehood in a commercial in a
>>>very long time. It was worse than wrong, it was harmful.
If you are in the UK, make a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority – not sure if the USA has an equivalent. I have sent in ten complaints this year. They will eventually get the message that these adverts are unacceptable.
When you are a captive audience, and if you don’t watch it will make no difference, why should they care? I’ve seen people complaining for the past 10 years, some at very high levels, and nothing has been done. Complain if you want, and I hope it does some good, but all I’m saying is not to be too disappointed if nothing comes of it.
As to the USA equivalent, it’s called “ratings.” If people don’t watch a show, sponsors will drop it, and when that happens, the show is dropped. It’s called “the free market,” and is about as responsive to the customer as you will ever get. State run media is a bureaucracy totally independent of what a forced customer wants. They aren’t responsive because they don’t care. And they don’t care because they don’t have to.
Yeah? So what? Is this new? Never before has there ever been a statement made in science that isn’t substantiated? Give me a break.
So a typo 2035 instead of 2350 propogated through to the IPCC report in 2007. Big deal. If it was deliberate, they would have kept on pushing it don’t you think? Funnily enough it doesn’t appear in the 2008 technical paper on Climate Change and Water published by the IPCC. http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_technical_papers_climate_change_and_water.htm
I remembered that paper too, but when I went to his site, I couldn’t locate it among the scores of other papers, articles, etc. Do you happen to remember its title or have a link?
NASA took the erroneous 2035 date and moved it forward another 5 years to make the statement:
See around the 5th photo down on the NASA page that gives the evidence for climate change: http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
The reference NASA cites is the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Summary for Policymakers, pp. 5, 7; but the only place I found Himalayan glaciers mentioned was in the body of the report.
Was there originally a reference to the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers in the AR4 Summary for Policymakers?
RE: My last: yonason (16:59:53) :
@Ralph (15:21:09) :
OK, I’ve found what I was following for a few years, but which has had no impact.
Have you heard of Trevor Asserson, who founded http://www.bbcwatch.com/
back in 2000? That’s what I was referring to in my last to you.
(see, also)
http://www.bbcwatch.com/reports.html
Some commentary from 2004.
http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp511.htm
Finally, here’s one of their reports, available from internet archive, that documents many breaches of the BBC charter in just it’s MidEast reporting.
http://web.archive.org/web/20020806101345/http://www.bbcwatch.com/
If they were to do the same with it’s Greenie advocacy, they would have no shortage of material.
Note that they weren’t able to effect any changes and don’t seem to be very active anymore. If they didn’t get anywhere, I doubt anyone else will succeed, short of a major BBC viewer revolt. And what are the odds of that?
Charlie (10:26:53) :
“Was there originally a reference to the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers in the AR4 Summary for Policymakers?”
It got washed away by the melting glaciers?. Yet more proof how dangerous “climate change” really is. With any luck in a few years the IPCC itself will have disappeared.
This was in the executive summary for the AR4 Working Group I:
“Glaciers in several mountain regions of the Northern Hemisphere retreated in response to orbitally forced regional warmth between 11 and 5 ka, and were smaller (or even absent) at times prior to 5 ka than at the end of the 20th century. The present day near-global retreat of mountain glaciers cannot be attributed to the same natural causes, because the decrease of summer insolation during the past few millennia in the Northern Hemisphere should be favourable to the growth of the glaciers”
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch6s6-es.html
Why include this strange comment in the summary? What is important is whether the retreat might be due to natural causes, not whether it is due to the “same natural causes” as these earlier events in the paleo record. The implication is left that the retreat isn’t naturally caused. The full text of the WG1 noted that the retreat started shortly after the end of the Little Ice Age. That was a naturally caused period that may well have been more favourable to the glaciers than the subsequent warmer period could sustain, even without a significant anthropogenic contribution.
It turns out that the IPCC is still promoting the “himalayan glaciers will be gone in 2035” meme. Here’s what Jean-Pascal van Ypersele*
(Jean-Pascal van Ypersele IPCC Vice-chair, said at UNFCCC, Barcelona, on 3 November, 2009):
,
Ref: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/presentations/unfccc-barcelona-nov-09/jpvy-nov-09-bcn.pdf
Is Global Warming Manmade?
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=4910
IPCC models did not predict the current global warming pause (assuming there is no “hide the decline”)
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=4976