Texas State Climatologist: "IPCC AR4 was flat out wrong" – relied on flawed WWF report

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report (PDF) An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China that was not peer-reviewed.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