But…there’s that word again, “robust” used in the context of error admission. Now all we need is an apology from Chairman Dr. Rajenda Pachauri for statements that claims that this error existed were “arrogant” and “voodoo science“. Will he give one? His track record suggests it is doubtful.
UPDATE: It seems Dr. Pachauri is getting a bit miffed over all the attention he’s getting over his ties to TERI and questions raised by Richard North and Christopher Booker in the UK telegraph. He’s threatening a lawsuit:
Angry Pachauri threatens to sue UK daily
This is the best thing that could happen, as it will mean independent discovery.
IPCC statement on the melting of Himalayan glaciers1
The Synthesis Report, the concluding document of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (page 49) stated: “Climate change is expected to exacerbate current stresses on water resources from population growth and economic and land-use change, including urbanisation. On a regional scale, mountain snow pack, glaciers and small ice caps play a crucial role in freshwater availability. Widespread mass losses from glaciers and reductions in snow cover over recent decades are projected to accelerate throughout the 21st century, reducing water availability, hydropower potential, and changing seasonality of flows in regions supplied by meltwater from major mountain ranges (e.g. Hindu-Kush, Himalaya, Andes), where more than one-sixth of the world population currently lives.”
This conclusion is robust, appropriate, and entirely consistent with the underlying science and the broader IPCC assessment.
It has, however, recently come to our attention that a paragraph in the 938-page Working Group II contribution to the underlying assessment2 refers to poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly.
The Chair, Vice-Chairs, and Co-chairs of the IPCC regret the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures in this instance. This episode demonstrates that the quality of the assessment depends on absolute adherence to the IPCC standards, including thorough review of “the quality and validity of each source before incorporating results from the source into an IPCC Report” 3. We reaffirm our strong commitment to ensuring this level of performance.
===============================================
1 This statement is from the Chair and Vice-Chairs of the IPCC, and the Co-Chairs of the IPCC Working Groups.
2 The text in question is the second paragraph in section 10.6.2 of the Working Group II contribution and a repeat of part of the paragraph in Box TS.6. of the Working Group II Technical Summary of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.
3 This is verbatim text from Annex 2 of Appendix A to the Principles Governing IPCC Work.
PDF of the announcement is here
h/t to WUWT reader Nigel Brereton
Sounds like RatherGate to me. The IPCC is claiming fake but accurate.
AGW has progressed from being junk science to being pseudo science.
Junk science is when scientists get a bit over subjective and enthusiastic when selecting data to fit their theories. It has little value but at least it was sincerely done
Pseudo science is pretend science. Wrapping up theories in fake science without even trying to make it fit with any raw data or real life observations. Like making some speculative comment over the telphone and then publishing the comment as if it were the conclusion of some research paper and then telling everyone it has been checked and peer reviewed.
Like knowingly including inverted upside down graphs in your data and then expecting no one to notice what you have done to reach your falsified conclusions. And then calling it science.
How many more examples of pseudoscience are out there waiting to be exposed?
I clicked on the email contact info at the bottom of the pdf that IPCC issued with this correction and inquired about the error in table 10.9 of AR4 WGII chapter 10.
The table has an entry for the average retreat of the Pindari glacier of 135.2 meters/year from 1845 to 1966. This appears to have been calculated by dividing the observed 2,840 meters of retreat by 21 years rather than the 121 year span between 1845 and 1966.
This error was picked up by a commenter in one of the blogs I frequent — this one, or Climate Audit, or Lucia’s blackboard … I forget which.
===================
I’ll report back the response, if any, from the IPCC-Sec@wmo.int
Charlie A (20:11:29) :
Considering what has been coming out of the IPCC as ‘science’, there’s every reason to suspect that it was intentional. Modelus Operandi. They just happened to have misplaced a “1” .
“In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly”.
Who do they think they are trying to fool? I just finished reading a 149 page recount of the leaked emails from east Anglia by John P Castello (clearly the most thourough, damning account I’ve read) The WG1 IPCC paper is totally and absolutely WORTHLESS.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/climategate_analysis.html
People will go to jail
To be a glacier scientist in tropical and temperate zones requires both scientific training and mountaineering skills. In most of the Himalayas, those with mountaineering skills are tribal people, and those with scientific training middle-class and urban.
“This conclusion is robust, appropriate, and entirely consistent with the underlying science and the broader IPCC assessment”.
Oh really? Here is an email exchange between Tom Crowley of the Department of Oceanography at the Texas A&M university and Malcolm Hughes September 22, 2000: email 0969618170
“Alpine glaciers also started to retreat in many regions around 1850, with one-third to one-half of their full retreat occurring before the warming that commenced about 1920”.
One third to one half of their FULL RETREAT OCCURRED BEFORE 1920. You don’t say. Here is Hughes’s reply..
“I tried to imply in my e-mail, but will now say it directly, that although a direct carbon dioxide effect is still the best candidate to explain this effect, it is far from proven. In any case, the relevant point is that there is no meaningful correlation with local temperature”.
In other words, these glaciers have been melting for 160yrs, most of it happened even before the 1920’s warming beagan and THEY DON’T KNOW THE CAUSE.
Spare us the lies.
geo (17:28:43) :
” When everything is “robust”, nothing is. . .”
Nice shot.
Why don’t they just admit that they made a robust error and be done with it?
Eroneous climaticus robustus. Greens for short.
Guess I’m a bit confused.
1. Glacier size remains stable: spring runoff consists of winter snowpack.
2. No glaciers: spring runoff consists of winter snowpack.
What am I missing?
Andrew_M_Garland (15:40:13) :
Even if there were no snow, but just rain, the population could build a dam and reservoir to catch the water, just like every place that does not have a snow-capped peak nearby.
Implying that as glaciers disappear it will stop raining exactly there, ‘is a feature not a bug’ and even touted as “robust, appropriate, and entirely consistent with the underlying science and the broader IPCC assessment.”
So if they haven’t already thought of it, no doubt it’s only a matter of time before the Tropics becomes Desert?
Shocker, Google News has RealClimate at the head of news for IPCC:
http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=ipcc
Not listed as a blog, or under the category blog, but as a mainline news story:
“The IPCC is not infallible (shock!)”
“This episode demonstrates that the quality of the assessment depends on absolute adherence to the IPCC standards, including thorough review of “the quality and validity of each source before incorporating results from the source into an IPCC Report”
And for a shining example of the “absolute adherence” to this “thorough review” – in all its gory glory – I invite you to take a look at “The climate change game … Monopoly: the IPCC version”
http://hro001.wordpress.com/2010/01/18/the-climate-change-game-monopoly-the-ipcc-version/
As Canada’s National Post columnist Peter Foster wrote on Jan. 20:
IPCC Meltdown
Now the question is whether Rajendra Pachauri should resign
“[…] the lead author of the relevant IPCC chapter, Murari Lal, rejected the notion that the IPCC had screwed up. “The IPCC authors did exactly what was expected from them,” he said.
“Never were truer words spoken. The IPCC’s task has always been not objectively to examine science but to make the case for man-made climate change by any means available.”
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2010/01/19/peter-foster-ipcc-meltdown.aspx
And in an OpEd in the same edition of the same paper, Lorne Gunter quite correctly concluded:
First Climategate, now Glaciergate
“You also get to see how the “settled” science behind climate change alarmism was arrived at — not by scientific consensus, but rather by manipulation, misrepresentation and strong-arming.”
http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=2461494
The term “voodoo science” describes the IPCC/WWF/Greenpeace party line pretty well. Check out this explanation of voodoo from CNN:
Afro-Creole religion, known as Vodou, still underpins the philosophy of many Haitians, though by no means everyone. A spirit-priest I know reads the earthquake as an allegorical message from the spirits who infuse the land. “The land is our mother,” he said. When you abuse the land — deforest her, plant only one crop, overpopulate her, erode her soil — she explodes, searching for a way to rebalance.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/18/mcalister.haiti.faith/index.html
Here’s yet another scandal, this time in Canada’s arctic. Read this and weep (or maybe not).
http://www.nationalpost.com/m/story.html?id=2465231&s=Home
I’ve just watched a national geographic special called: “Six Degrees Could Change the World” which can only be described as a compenium of lies.
With appearances by all of the recently disgraced “experts” i wonder how long until this movie gets retracd / apologised for, since the science they presented has clearly been unmasked as hype.
It is completely over the top fear mongering … presented as unbiased science.
D. King (18:48:25) :
[snip – we don’t need to stoop to this level, the IPCC is doing fine on its own -A]
Am I alone in being curious to know just how low D. King did stoop?!
Clawga (17:04:38) :
rabidfox (12:16:38) :
I don’t think that ‘robust’ means what they think it means.
Or as Inigo Montoya says ” You keep saying that word. I think it does not mean what you think it means”
In a similar vein:
“Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word ‘safe’ that I wasn’t previously aware of.”
Arthur Dent – Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy
“Gilbert (22:50:12) :
Guess I’m a bit confused.
1. Glacier size remains stable: spring runoff consists of winter snowpack.
2. No glaciers: spring runoff consists of winter snowpack.
What am I missing?”
The glaciers do affect the timing of the runoff. Snow melts later and slower and the summer low in river runoff is consequently mitigated.
What is so obvious is that anyone who can do basic O level mathematics and actually does some basic calculations can’t help but be sceptical of almost any IPCC claim. I became sceptical because I plotted annual temperature data on the temperature prediction graph of the 2001 report and could clearly see that it fell below the entire range of predictions – even outside the envelope. How could that be ? And how could anyone claim AGW is accelerating ?
In this case, an application of basic maths to divide glacier thicknesses by the annual melt rate would have shown something very awry. And we have that idiot Pauchuri claiming anyone who does so is practicing ‘voodoo science’. These people are PATHETIC ! It makes my blood boil – the arrogance, self-righteousness and downright incompetence of people who claim to have the only truth. Call me Mr. Angry – but I’ve had enough of them.
Jimmy Haigh (01:47:23) :
Am I alone in being curious to know just how low D. King did stoop?!
Low enough Jimmy. It was a deserved snip.
Dave
Eric (skeptic) (17:49:06) writes:
But from the original newspaper article: When finally published, the IPCC report did give its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the glaciers melting was “very high”.
Go back and reread the IPCC WG II report. There’s no mention of a “very high” probability related to Section 10.6.2, which is where the Himalayan glacier report in question is cited. I don’t know which newspaper article you are referring to here, but if the author of that article was reading 10.6.2 and assigned a probability to it, then he was mixing up two unrelated sections of the report. Based on that assumption (which I will gladly correct once I see the article you refer to), this strikes me as poor science journalism.
Harry, (17:37:16) :
You wrote: “So exactly how does a claim that the Himalaya’s will melt by 2035 get thru a quality control check if it was reviewed by a skeptic? There wasn’t even one scientific paper that concluded that. Nothing, nada..an off the cuff remark in a magazine interview.
It fit the reviewers ‘belief system’. ”
This is true and always true if you assume people never make mistakes. I do not accept that assumption. I’ve already addressed to you how quality control systems sometimes fail. You’ve chosen not to respond to that point, so I don’t know what your analysis of that is. WGII, chapter 10 has some 25 authors/reviewers cited on page one, and about 500 reference cited throughout. In a document that complex, it is very easy to see how an error could happen.
I’m not defending the error. I am merely pointing out that I am not going to assume improper motives to any individuals without proof. I don’t understand why you appear to do that (correct me if I am wrong about this assumption).
@Herman Dobrowolski L: Here’s a comment I’ve previously posted twice on WUWT in the last two days:
Roger Pielke’s, Jr.’s blog points out flaws in that defense. An IPCC insider, Georg Kaser, revealed that:
1. He had alerted the IPCC staff about the error prior to publication, but they refused to correct it.
2. None of the other reviewers pointed out this glaring error.
3. The people in charge of the Asia section of the report lacked relevant expertise. (“They were without any knowledge of glaciology.”)
4. Everyone in the IPCC is now aware of the fault and intends to correct it in the next report. This means that Pachauri’s vigorous defense of the flawed report against criticism by a non-alarmist recent Indian government report implies that either he was unaware (out of touch) or aware (deceitful).
Here’s the link to Pielke’s article: http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/01/stranger-and-stranger.html
Herman L,
Let me put this in terms AGW enthisiasts can understand.
The EPA used as basis for it’s legal authority to regulate CO2 the IPCC report.
In the US the EPA has full authority to determine what it may or may not regulate based on it’s interpretation of the ‘scientific evidence’.
Scientific Evidence is a legal term. One year all the Drunk Driving Convicitions in Wa State were thrown out. The breathalyzer machines had been calibrated with a thermometer that hadn’t been calibrated according to ANSI standards. The State argued that at most the error would mean a difference in .0001 in the breathalyzerI reading. The Drunks Association argued that it did not matter how much the error was, the evidence given by the breathalyzer failed to meets the standards of ‘addmissable scientific evidence’. The Drunk Association won.
Big Coal, Oil etc now have incontrovertible proof that part of the IPCC report fails to meet the standards of ‘Admissable Scientific Evidence’.
Big Coal et al will argue that since part of the IPCC report incontrovertibly fails to meet the standard of ‘scientific evidence’, the entire report must be excluded from evidence.
Without any evidence, EPA has no legal basis to regulate CO2.
How would you describe the people who provided ‘gift wrapped’ evidence to the Coal Industry?