10/54,000 = .0185 % That’s an impressively small sample size. Apparently Pachauri’s zeal to get back the Himalayagate claim of melting by 2035 outweighs any rational attempts at science. In any other discipline, a sample size this small would be laughed off as ridiculous, but this is climate science, where ridiculous has become the norm, especially when trotted out for the Durban Climate Conference.
Excerpts from the UK telegraph:
Himalayan glaciers are melting, says IPCC research
The Himalayan glaciers are melting after all, according to new research released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The research was released in an effort to draw a line under the embarrassing mistakes made about the effects of global warming on the region in the past.
The IPCC were forced to apologise for claiming that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.
The 2009 scandal, known as ‘Himalayagate’ led to criticism of the IPCC, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to warn governments around the world about the effects of climate change.
In an effort to move on from the embarrassing episode, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC, has now announced that the latest statistics show the glaciers are melting, according to the limited amount of science available.
The reports, presented at the UN climate change talks in Durban were brought together by the the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).
…
One three year study, funded by Sweden, found that of 10 glaciers measured in the region all are shrinking, with a marked acceleration in loss of ice between 2002 and 2005.
==============================================================
“…funded by Sweden” Does anyone care to place any bets on WWF and/or Greenpeace involvement in this? I’m sure Donna Leframboise will take a good look into this one.
Meanwhile, here’s all the reason you need not to trust anything the IPCC says. This comment left on our open thread today from Roger Knights is about as growing into Himalayagate 2 as you can get:
Three Strikes Against the IPCC’s Asia Group (By Roger Knights)
(Summary: This post points out the cherry picking of quotations by the IPCC’s Asia group to spice up its widely publicized claim that 3/4 of a billion Asians were at risk of water shortages from glacier-melt.)
Here’s a bone for the gang to gnaw on and flesh out (to mangle a metaphor). I haven’t fully researched the matter, but what I’ve noticed is intriguing.
During a dispute with one of the one-star Amazon-reviewers (T. Bruner) of Donna Laframboise’s Delinquent Teenager book about the IPCC, I wrote:
“She [DL] wrote, at Location 763 in Chapter 14: ‘When the IPCC declared that three-quarters of a billion people in India and China depend on glaciers for their water supply, is it not strange that its only source for this claim was the Stern review?’ The link she supplied there takes one to that section of the IPCC report, 10.4.2, where one can see the single citation for oneself, as I have done.”
(My exchange with T. Bruner starts on the 5th comments page of his review, linked to below, but the most relevant material is on the 6th page. http://www.amazon.com/review/R3D6YKUGYE4WA0/ref=cm_cd_pg_pg5?ie=UTF8&cdForum=Fx2983WIRKIRW6A&cdPage=5&asin=B005UEVB8Q&store=digital-text&cdThread=TxO5HUAZSS2GUT#wasThisHelpful )
Bruner pointed out that the Stern Review in turn had cited, as its authority for that statement, Barnett et al., which, unlike Stern, was a peer-reviewed and before-the-deadline publication. He added that the Fresh Water Group had cited Barnett alone, in Section 3.4.3 (of AR4).
This made me wonder: Why had the Asia group taken the risk of violating the IPCC’s rules by citing Stern alone? Wouldn’t citing Barnett in addition, or instead, have been prudent?
It’s unlikely that the group hadn’t been aware of the Barnett paper, given that it was cited by Stern, and given its relevance, recency, and prominent & prestigious source, which could be found in Stern’s bibliography:
Barnett, T.P., J.C, Adam, and D.P. Lettenmaier (2005): ‘Potential impacts of a warming climate on water availability in snow-dominated regions’, Nature 438: 303-309
So this relevant, recent, and prestigiously published primary source, Nature, which all contributors had access to in their libraries, was omitted in favor of citing a gray, secondary, after-the-deadline (2007, hence unpublished per the IPCC’s rules) source. (It’s not cited anywhere in the Asia Group’s chapter, per its References section.)
Why? Let’s get started by looking at what the two sources and the Asia Group said. I’ve emphasized the most pertinent passages. (h/t to T. Bruner for the quotes.):
1. Barnett et al., as summarized by the Fresh Water Group, in AR4 WGII Section 3.4.3:
“Hence, water supply in areas fed by glacial melt water from the Hindu Kush and Himalayas, on which hundreds of millions of people in China and India depend, will be negatively affected (Barnett et al., 2005).”
Go to 5th paragraph, last sentence, here:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/ch3s3-4-3.html
2. Stern Review, 2007, Section 3.2, page 63:
“Climate change will have serious consequences for people who depend heavily on glacier meltwater to maintain supplies during the dry season, including large parts of the Indian sub-continent, over quarter of a billion people in China, and tens of millions in the Andes. (Barnett et al., 2005)”
Go to p. 8 at this link: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/Chapter_3_How_climate_change_will_affect_people_around_the_world_.pdf
4. Asia Group, in AR4 WGII Section 10.4.2.1:
“Climate change-related melting of glaciers could seriously affect half a billion people in the Himalaya-Hindu-Kush region and a quarter of a billion people in China who depend [unqualified] on glacial melt for their water supplies (Stern, 2007).”
Go to the second paragraph, second sentence, here: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/ch10s10-4-2.html
Strike one: If the Asia group had cited Barnett at all it would have exposed its claims about three-quarters of a billion and “seriously affected” as being hyperbole. (Barnett et al. had used the less-exaggerated, less-alarmist words, “hundreds of millions” and “negatively affected.”) It’s not a big leap to infer that that was the motive for its omission. What other motive could there have been?
(“Hundreds of millions” suggests the lower end of the one-hundred-million-to-one-billion range. If Barnett et al. had had three-quarters of a billion in mind when they wrote “hundreds of millions,” they’d likely have indicated that they were thinking of the upper part of the range by saying something like “over a half-billion” or “many hundreds of millions.”)
Strike two: The Asia Group lied by omission by omitting Stern’s key qualification, “during the dry season.” Including it would have muted the alarmist impact of their sentence. It’s not a big leap to infer that that was the motive for its omission. What other motive could there have been?
Strike three: The Asia Group’s gray-lit-backed claim of a 2035 melt-by date now looks likely to be a similarly culpable instance of cherry-picking in the service of alarmist hyperbole, rather than clueless unfamiliarity with the dynamics of glaciers. They were likely knaves, not fools, in other words.
One reason it’s “likely” is the context provided by the two “strikes” above. Another reason is the context provided by their refusal to correct the error in their 2035 melt-by date when reviewers pointed it out to them, and their turning a deaf ear to Dr. Georg Kaser’s subsequent attempts to have it corrected.
(I’m skeptical of the IPCC’s excuse that Kaser sent his first complaint to the wrong department—wouldn’t they have forwarded it?—and that his second letter wasn’t received—a “likely story.” It seems more likely to me that the group couldn’t possibly admit to ignoring his letters—so it didn’t.)
Strike four: The three strikes above suggest that the IPCC has been infected by gang-of-green alarmism. The IPCC’s apologists have spun a deceptive damage-control message about the 2035 error by attributing it to ignorance, not malice—to cluelessness, not culpability. In the context of the deceptive pattern described above, that’s hard to believe.
Obviously, it would be awkward for the IPCC if the second interpretation gained traction, because that would raise the questions, “Where did the gangrene start?”, “How far has it spread?”, “Is amputation needed?”, and “Or maybe a mercy killing?”.
Paging Dr. Kevorkian!
========
For a brief history of Himalaya-gate, see my comment here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/17/the-wit-and-wisdom-of-real-climate-scientist-dr-ray-pierrehumbert/#comment-683880
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It gets even better, commenter DirkH adds in the same thread:
The funniest part is that the IPCC report contains a table of glaciers and the speed with which they retreat or grow. ON THE SAME PAGE AS THE 2035 DATE!
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/ch10s10-6-2.html
The only part they left out is the length of the glaciers; in the case of the Gangotri, for instance, 30km. So obviously nobody of them ever did this mental exercise called “computing” where you divide a length by a yearly distance to get an estimate of the number of years that have to pass until the thing is gone. This is, as the media repeatedly told us, the Gold Standard of climate science, and serves as the blueprint for all future international scientific collaborations under the UN.
Here’s the IPCC errata and table 10.9:
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).
So let’s do the math for Gangotri glacier, which according to Wikipedia: The glacier is about 30 kilometres long (19 miles) and 2 to 4 km (1 to 2 mi) wide.
30 kilometers (30,000 meters) divided by 28 meters/year = 1071.4 years for Gangotri glacier to disappear at the current retreat rate.
That’s a bit further out than 2035.
UPDATE: I’ve updated IPCC table 10.9 and it is shown below with two column additions. I was unable to find a reference for length of the the Ponting Glacier but if someone can locate it I’ll update the table to include it.
Note that the Pindari Glacier does have a chance of disappearing by 2035 if the rate of retreat keeps up. Perhaps that one was the source of confirmation bias. Looking at this photo from Wikipedia though…
…it looks rather “dirty” with a lot of albedo reducing components in it. That might explain why it is melting at a much faster rate than all the others.
So they came up with another report for Durban, now, did they? Very clever.
As you remember, Pauchauri called Raina’s report Voodoo science. Well, it turned out it was Pachauri who was the voodo-scientist.
Here is Rainas report;
http://gbpihed.gov.in/MoEF%20Dissussion%20Paper%20on%20Himalayan%20Glaciers.pdf
And here is an interesting article on the subject, citing many non-alarmist scientists on the subject;
http://www.agu.org/news/press/pr_archives/pdf/2010-29.pdf
More disinformation and lies are being streamed to Durban. A Swiss team is also reporting to Durban that “three-quarters of the warming seen since 1950 is down to human influences.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16022585
They also complain: “”We now face the triple whammy of distracted world leaders, a scarcity of carbon finance, and a fast-closing window of opportunity to avoid dangerous climate change.”
It amazes me how their song never changes, no matter what is happening in the world. GK
“They were likely knaves, not fools, in other words.”
Climate Science is nothing but an “anything goes” Propaganda Op. directed at thought control. The “cause” = Thought control. TC = TC.
The Gandotri glacier is counted twice for the period 1985 to 1990, Why couldn’t they have just one assesment that covered the whole 1977-2001?
Still, it looks like the 2035 claim is based on Pindari and extrapolated to the whole Himalayas, so at least one mystery is cleared up..
” A dam is a human built glacier which stores water over the dry season.”
If a beaver builds a dam to benefit its’ community then it is Natural.
If a human builds a dam to benefit its’ community then it is Not-Natural.
See also: Beavers and trees, elephants and watering holes, moss and wetlands, …
“…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…”
To me, the term “disappearing”, means totally gone.
To them, shrinking to one-fifth in the next 24 years is “disappearing”.
Sounds like a bad magician – “I’ll make this elephant disappear”, yet only four-fifths of that elephant goes away.
And it took him 24 years to get that far…
Richard Black (BBC) is already quoting this paper, dire report in tune with the gravy train. he can say what he wants but not on my licence fee, it should be accurate.
Dr Voodoo got $3 million in grants from the Indian government as a result of the IPCC prediction of 2035. When the facts came out, the Indian government decided they had had enough of the IPCC and Dr Voodoo and would do their own research via INCCA.
The comments in the WSJ over Mann’s latest letter are worth reading. Mann is sawing off the limb on which he sits.
Anthony – Minister Kent announced in Durban Canada is PULLING OUT OF Kyoto!
“She [DL] wrote, at Location 763 in Chapter 14: ‘When the IPCC declared that three-quarters of a billion people in India and China depend on glaciers for their water supply, is it not strange that its only source for this claim was the Stern review?’
Another strange thing is the Climate Propagandists’ attempt to create the whole perception that if glaciers have receded, it has stopped raining and snowing. And that people can’t adapt without becoming sudden hordes of wilding “climate refugees”.
Right, “So let’s create the same allegedly imminent worldwide problem we’re allegedly seeking to avoid, before it’s too late!” “Hey, you can believe me, because …drum roll…I am a Climate Scientist!”
The square root of a normally distributed population is a good rule of thumb for sample size. 232 out of 54000.
…it looks rather “dirty” with a lot of albedo reducing components in it. That might explain why it is melting at a much faster rate than all the others. Compare it to…?
Please put in the rest. Waiting with bated breath!!!
Max
“If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”- Prince Phillip, Head of the World Wildlife Fund “Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.”- David Foreman, founder Earth First “To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem”- Lamont Cole, environmentalist and author. “We have wished…for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us back into the stone age…”- Stewart Brand, editor Whole Earth Catalogue. “I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.””- John Davis, Environmental Author and Leader “My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.”- Alexander King, speaking for the Club of Rome “Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planet…Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along. “- David Graber, biologist, National Park Service “You think Hiroshima was bad, let me tell you, mister, Hiroshima wasn’t bad enough!”- Faye Dunaway, speaking as ‘The Voice of the Planet’, WTBS series. “Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society.”- David Brower, founder Friends of the Earth.
The most egregious error is not even in whether the glaciers are retreating: The dry season in India is winter, when the snow pack is not melting. When the snow is melting, they have monsoons and no shortage of water (frequent flooding in fact). The people claiming decreased glaciers mean less water for people are taking a European (even Mediterranean) POV for granted.
I grew up in SE Wisconsin on the boarder of Racine and Kenosha counties. That is PRECISELY where the Wisconsionian glacier (Wuerm in Europe) terminated around 10-12 thousand years ago. We have rolling hills, drumlins and kettles and morrains all around the area. The feeder creeks all drain toward Lake Michigan. We still find mastedon elephants buried in Kenosha county from back then. What is the point of all of this?
The glacier spanned from SE Wisconsin to well above tha artic circle back then. The question then is, Why did the glacier get that far south, why did it stay there that long (30-40 thousand years) and what melted it to where it is today? It was not CO2 I’ll bet. Like the commercial says, it’s the sun stupid.
Its should be noted that the “effected” comment only notes that there is some form of affect of unquantified scale, it could be as little as a 2% decrease in summer flows – its not quantified – but I doubt its start scary, there will still be snow build up over winter and a melt season, so it would only be the end of summer when you would notice any change
Glaciers have been retreating since the “Little Ice Age”!
Tree-ring evidence of ‘Little Ice Age’ glacier advances in southern Tibet, Achim Bräuning, The Holocene April 2006 vol. 16 no. 3 369-380
During some years western Himalayan glacier grow while in others they retreat. Those above a certain “equilibrium-line altitude” (ELA) expand while those below retreat. e.g.
Anil V. Kulkarni, Mass Balance of Himalayan glaciers using AAR and ELA methods.
See Long-Term Climate variability and change over monsoon Asia. GB Pant, J. Ind. Geophys, Union (2003)
Monsoon rainfall varies. e.g. see Fig/ 4 from 88.5 in 1883 to 83 cm in 1909 to 86 in 1935 to 84 in 1960. Glaciers will advance/retreat accordingly.
Glaciers vary with location. e.g.:
Quaternary glaciation of the Himalayan–Tibetan orogen
Another reason for glacial retreat:
Structure, Formation, and Darkening Process of Albedo-reducing Material (Cyroconite) on a Himalayan Glacier: A granular Algal Mat Growing on the Glacier. Takeuchi et al. Artic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2001, pp 115-122
There is a lot more complexity than alarmist headlines acknowledge.
I haven’t checked all the posts in this thread, so apologies if it has already been mentioned, but as the first post asks about WWF funding an article in the Daily Telegraph’s finance section gives part of the answer. The RSA insurance group is linked in with them to “sponsor a series of environmental projects across the world”.
WWF creates the scare and RSA sells the insurance you need to protect yourself from it.
One of their directors came up with a classic quote “Arctic ice is melting – what does that mean in reality? It could mean that the house I own, that is currently outside a flood plain, finds itself in one if the tide goes up another metre.”
I’ve found the article on the Telegraph website. So if anyone wants to read it in ful:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/insurance/8934119/RSA-uses-polar-bear-tie-up-to-help-it-understand-climate-risks.html
Of course it has the required cute photo of polar bears.
Lots of glaciers appear to be growing
http://www.iceagenow.com/Growing_Glaciers.htm
Re : misterjohnqpublic says:
December 4, 2011 at 7:21 pm
Who is really funding the WWF and Green Peace?
We need FOIA to “liberate” the books.
————————————————————————
The EU provides much of the funding for these green lobby groups.
Neat eh – it’s ‘Propaganda by Proxy’
“According to a report published today by International Policy Network, the Directorate-General for the Environment – the European Commission unit that deals with environment affairs – has handed out over €66 million in core funding to green NGOs. The IPN report focuses on the Green 10 – a coalition of NGOs that pushes environmental issues at the EU-level. All the usual suspects are here – Friends of the Earth Europe, WWF-Europe, and other more EU-focused groups like the European Environmental Bureau and Climate Action Network Europe.”
It provides the money for the NGOs to lobby on EU preferred policies, this money has escalated significantly “from just over €2 million in 1998 to nearly €9 million in 2009. Friends of the Earth Europe saw its funding increase by 325%, while Birdlife Europe’s funding increased by an astounding 900% over the same period.”
http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/environment/propaganda-by-proxy-how-the-eu-funds-green-lobby-groups
It is also the EU that has skewed the research such that funds are readily available only if it follows the ‘consensus’ meme.
“The real culprit in the corruption of the scientific process and the promotion of climate alarmism is named again and again in the East Anglia e-mails and documents. But the culprit is named with many different names, mysterious combinations of letters and numbers and lyrical code words, names like “dgxii, dgxi fp5 fp6 fp7 life enrich.” What do they mean? In the final analysis, it is but one and the same multinational organization that lurks behind all these designations: the European Union.”
“It is no accident that EU funding leads to politicized science. “Promoting research that supports eu policies” is, after all, one of the stated “main strategic objectives” of the Research dg’s framework programmes.5 Indeed, the joint European Council/European Parliament decision adopting Framework Programme 7 promises “a new approach . . . which should allow the political objectives of Community research policy to be reached more easily.”6 …According to publicly available European Commission data, wwf was awarded nearly €9 million in eu support in 2008 alone. In 2007, the figure was over €7.5 million. The money came from several different eu budget lines, including development aid, “communication,” and the environment dg’s life+ program. Most of the support took the form of ostensibly project-linked grants to wwf-International or its national affiliates. The largest single grant — for €3,499,999 — went to wwf-International in 2007.”
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/43291
So…a combination of the interests of Big Finance, Big Green, Big Corporates and Big Govt. and it’s us hard-pressed tax-payers who are milked to pay for it all!!!
ferd berple says:
December 5, 2011 at 8:32 am
The square root of a normally distributed population is a good rule of thumb for sample size. 232 out of 54000.
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At the risk of being repetitiously boring, the words ‘normally distributed population’ are the key here. Glaciers in the Himalayas are not a ‘normally distributed population’. Indeed, they are not a population at all.
It is possible to apply robust sampling techniques to Himalayan glaciers, but the cost and difficulty of doing it are immense. The first hurdle is the assumption that all glaciers were created on Day X, and last forever, which seems to be underlying the statements of morons like Pachauri. As David Hagen notes above, the lifecycle of glaciers is complex.
This stuff is so cringeworthy, it is hard to understand why scientists with any self respect can silently go along with it.
Yet another issue is the science says that black carbon (soot, often referred to as aerosols) is causing up to 90% of the glacier melt.
http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/90-of-himalayan-glacier-melting-caused-by-aerosols-black-carbon.html
Black carbon is a huge problem in India where many millions rely on burning coal, wood and biomass for cooking and heating.
The solution is to bring cheap mains electricity to these people And the cheapest way to generate electricity in India is from coal.