Barry Woods writes via email:
Previously: (at Copenhagen) Prime Minister Gordon Brown said:
“In 25 years the glaciers that provide water for 3/4 of a billion people will disapear entirely”
Now: Himalayan Glaciers (and others) New Research Casts Doubt on Doomsday Water Shortage Predictions
Some great quotes from various scientists in Scientific American:
He agreed that overstatements about the impacts are rampant in the Himalayas as well, saying, “The idea that 1.4 billion people are going to be without water when the glaciers melt is just not the case.
From the Andes to the Himalayas, scientists are starting to question exactly how much glaciers contribute to river water used downstream for drinking and irrigation. The answers could turn the conventional wisdom about glacier melt on its head.
Yet, scientists complain, data are often inaccurately incorporated in dire predictions of Himalayan glacial melt impacts.
Creeping hyperbole?
“Hyperbole has a way of creeping in here,” said Bryan Mark, an assistant professor of geography at Ohio State University and a researcher
Mark said he expects to find that the impact of monsoon water is greatly underestimated in the Himalayas.
Climate Dissident says:
October 25, 2011 at 6:20 am
I’ve never understood why disappearing glaciers is a problem.
If the glaciers stop receding, then they cannot provide water. If they disappear they also no longer provide water. They are similar to a damn, they cannot provide water they can only store it and their net effect is zero.”
Indeed, if the world cools, and glaciers grow, then water runoff will reduce.
AnonyMoose says:
October 25, 2011 at 5:47 am
Clouds have no effect on climate, so the rain from them can be ignored.
The sun also has no effect on climate either. All those photons = no effect. Sad.
The biggest problem the Earth faces at the moment is overpopulation but everyone is trying to save and prolong the length of human life. Just let nature take its course!
Gordon Brown is a pretty cool dude; I recall he was going to control the earth temperature rise to 2 degrees.
That’s not just brillliant science, it is incredible planetary engineering.
By the way he also wrecked the UK economy (thus saving millions of tons of carbon!)
“Gordon Brown was Dr Watson to Tony Blair’s Sherlock Holmes.” That’s a slur on Dr Watson, who was, in the books, far from being the idiot that Nigel Bruce played; he was Holmes’s trusted friend and colleague.
Tony Blair as Sherlock Holmes…that charlatan! The Holmes character deserves better than that!
Kelvin Vaughan says, The biggest problem the Earth faces at the moment is overpopulation but everyone is trying to save and prolong the length of human life. Just let nature take its course!
How is that a problem for the earth? “Earth” will be just fine if people disappear. A problem for people maybe, not the earth. I always get a charge out of this mother earth stuff.
From Gordon Brown’s ‘Fewer than 50 Days’ speech: (skip the ad. glaciers 55sec in)
Gordon Brown PM:
“There are now fewer than 50 days to set the course for the next few decades’
“If we do not reach a deal over the next few months, let us be in no doubt”
“Once the damage from unchecked emissions growth is done, no retrospective global agreement in some future period can undo that choice, by then it will be irretreivably too late..
..we should never allow ourselves to lose site of the catastrophy we face, if present warming trends continue…..”
“In 25 years the glaciers that provide water for 3/4 of a billion people could disapear entirely”
———–
pls Note, checked video again, says could not will. The whole speech is totally alarmist in nature. Yet, It sounds so very dated now, very alarmist, even the underwater Maldive’s cabinet meeting
summer heatwave mentioned…
In the lifetime of our children, grandchildren, etc.the intense temps of 2003, could become the average temps , etc
worth listening to all 2 and a half alarmist minutes worth.
Not least after, 50 days, to set the course for the decades to come, lest it be irretiivably damaged, Copenhagen failed politically, and all the 50 days (alarmist rhetoric) soon forgotten.. So can I be called a ‘political climate cynic’ now…
The glacier-centric “physics” of Climate Science apparently necessititates that if a glacier disappears, it stops raining and snowing. And we’re all gonna die.
But take some people, a river, a glacier, and stable sublimation and rain and snow year over year. Increasing glacier must mean decreasing water for river, right? Decreasing glacier must mean increasing water for river, until glacier is gone, right? So far so good?
“No! Because when the glacier is gone, it’s suddenly stopped snowing and raining and we’re all dead, you fool….oops, except then leaving the GCM’s to correctly ‘manage’ what’s left according to ‘the physics’. So, Yes!”
Help me out here. They claim that most of the water is coming from melting glaciers. So what happens to the water flow if we were somehow able to stop glacier melting?
Not so fast. You can’t trust anything climate scientists say, especially Peter Gleick.
Kelvin Vaughan says:
October 25, 2011 at 7:54 am
The biggest problem the Earth faces at the moment is overpopulation but everyone is trying to save and prolong the length of human life. Just let nature take its course!”
Dear Kevin, please stop eating, then nature will take her course.
The quote in Scientific American, from Peter Gleick sound perfectly reasonable…….
—————————–
Creeping hyperbole
“There has been a lot of misinformation and confusion about it,” said Peter Gleick, co-director of the California-based Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security. “About 1.3 billion people live in the watersheds that get some glacier runoff, but not all of those people depend only on the water from those watersheds, and not all the water in those watersheds comes from glaciers. Most of it comes from rainwater,” he said.
—————————–
Where all these scientists were 2 years ago, when politicians were spouting off like Gordon Brown to the world’s media…. is of course another question…
Why were they not correcting these hugely high profil public announcements of ‘water shortgages’ that afftected hundreds of millions of people in a few short years…
This article reflects a number of such that have been appearing in Indian periodicals over the last 2 years. It does not appear to go into the importance of maintaining a forested watershed, but others do. And there is a general call for action in that regard, especially after the Pakistani floods of last year.
Note the comments:
“6. pokerplyer 10:19 AM 10/25/11
I am amazed. Scientific American actually published an article demonstrating that a conclusions written by the IPCC regarding AGW was WRONG. Something must have frozen over…lol
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this
7. Trent1492 11:34 AM 10/25/11
Yo Poker Player,
Allow me to introduce you this thing called science. One of the great definitions of science is an error correction method. I like that. What you perceive as a weakness is a strength.
Now if only we could get Anthony Watts to admit to his errors…”
As I posted earlier I have been to Thailand for 1 year and they have more water than they need.
Most of it runs off into the ocean.
Those people are smart enough to build a dam and save the water from the monsoon into the dry season. It is an insult to claim they aren’t.
Gordon Brown was just repeating what he was told. He’s clueless. The only surprise is that he didn’t go on to explain that the UK was already doomed because the glaciers there are already gone.
On April 28 1975 Time magazine had on its front cover the title THE BIG FREEZE!!, with an article, signed by climate scientists, concluding that the Earth is cooling to the point it will all be covered in ice and all living creatures will die.
The “scientists” even came up with a solution: collect all the ashes and residues generated by coal-burning power plants and spread it over the North Pole, to capture the heat generated by the sun….
This could only have come from sick, perverted minds, but at the time it was viewed as a real option.
After a few years, when it obviously turned out that such a theory was nonsense, the so called climate scientists, in their quest for government grants, have invented a new fantasy, that of global warming……
son and charles;
The “2035” number was a digit inversion of 2350, which itself was lifted from dirty grey literature written by a journalist, etc. It was accepted, then defended, rationalized, acknowledged but pooh-poohed, and swept under the rug &/or Pachauri’s beard by the IPCC.
David says:
October 25, 2011 at 9:02 am
Dear Kevin, please stop eating, then nature will take her course.
I thought of that Dave but what about all that CO2 released by my rotting body?
There is far too much ice in the world (that is why we are still in an “ice age”). In order for ice to be biologically useful it must first melt. Every square inch of ice retreat is matched with a plant and biomass advance. Water is water. When it falls on a mountain it eventually reaches the bottom, as ice or not. The time delay, of that journey, is irrelevant to it’s eventual destination. If we want to save it, for our use, we must dam it, into liquid reservoirs. Ice just won’t deliver on demand. GK