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
=============================================================
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.
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Errata 494 Chapter 10 Table 10.9. Line 2. Replace “135.2” with “23.5”.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/errataserrata-errata.html#493-2
Glaciers lengths, like most climate features, must have cycles when they retreat and when the expand. It is not right to assume that if they are retreating they will continue to do so till they vanish forever.
more on himalayan glacier melt:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/9/26593/2009/acpd-9-26593-2009.html
talks about black carbon being the problem
“In India BC from biofuel combustion is highly prevalent and compared to other regions, BC aerosol amounts are high.”
WillieB says:
December 4, 2011 at 9:23 pm
There appears to be an error with the IPCC’s math regarding the Pindari Glacier.
1966-1845=121 years
2840m/121yrs=23.47m/yr not 135.2m/yr
3.000m/23.47m/yr=127.8 years
The IPCC table is wrongly based on mistakenly using 1945 instead of 1845.
1966-1945=21yrs
2840m/21years=135.2m/yr
—————————————
Ronaldo says:
December 5, 2011 at 2:07 am
Anthony
Please note apparent error in table 10.9
John says:
December 4, 2011 at 9:38 pm
Regarding the rate of the Pindari glacier…if you divide 2840 m of retreat by 21 (i.e. 1945 to 1966 and NOT 1845 to 1966!!) you get 135.2 m/yr. Either the date is wrong or the rate is wrong.
Also noted by Willie B at 9.23
———————————————
Anthony,
Has anyone checked this out. If it does date from 1845 then this would seem to be more realistic. A retreat of 23.5 m/yr would fit far better with the other figures.
This is also quite an interesting analysis – the suggestions from reviewers that were ignored or incorporated.
For example
“The receding and thinning of Himalayan glaciers”
“Hayley Fowler writes: “I am not sure that this is true for the very large Karakoram glaciers in
the western Himalaya. Hewitt (2005) suggests from measurements that these are expanding –
and this would certainly be explained by climatic change in preciptiation and temperature
trends seen in the Karakoram region (Fowler and Archer, J Climate in press; Archer and
Fowler, 2004) You need to quote Barnett et al.’s 2005 Nature paper here – this seems very
similar to what they said.” The team responds: “Was unable to get hold of the suggested
references will consider in the final version.” None of the references are used in the final
version, and the challenged statement stands.”
http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/dl/Expert_And_Government_Comments.pdf
joshua Corning says:
December 4, 2011 at 9:01 pm
“In any other discipline, a sample size this small would be laughed off as ridiculous”
Opinion and political polls question about 1000 people.”
Correct but you are selecting from a much more homogeneous medium (people) in a random way. Selecting ten melting glaciers from tens of thousands is not the same thing. Its like selecting 10 apples from tens of thousands of apples, oranges and pears.
Regarding Anthony’s table, I would add another column with a realistic meltback based on the elevation profile of the glacier. As you go up the glacier, you rise in elevation and the temperature is cooler. The time to melt would be the “n” from the sum of a geometric series that adds up to the length of the glacier. For the loss of, say, 5m/yr in the present year from a 5,000m glacier, the following years losses would decline: Sum k^0 to n = ar^0 + ar^1 + ar^2 +……ar^n, where a=5 and (for a mere 5m, lets choose r=0.995 or so, which means that in the next year we lose 5 x 0.995= 4.98m. Reasonable?). However in the 50th year we lose 5(0.995^49)= 3.91m. In the linear reduction of IPCC, 5m/year for a 5,000m glacier would take 1000yrs, but lets see how much we lose in the 200th year = 5(0.995^199) = 1.84m – you can see that it will take a lot longer than these guys think.
Nicholas Stern is an economist who makes predictions about the future climate.
He is so good at predictions, that before it happened, he remained silent on the world financial crash.
I would have thought that such an expert predictor would have noticed this coming?
It’s interesting that the sentence which DL castigates –
“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 on glacial melt for their water supplies (Stern, 2007).”
did not exist in the second order draft. If I understand their procedures correctly, the SOD is the last commented/reviewed version – there actually is no review of the “final” draft by either the experts or the governments (and the IPCC processes are still unclear to me, so this assumption may be incorrect). It appears to me that this sentence was inserted and NOT reviewed by the external reviewers. In the comments on the SOD, no one suggested that this paragraph needed additional information or further detail or support.
One is then left wondering who reviewed and amended the document AFTER the SOD, to insert this claim? Presumably, the Lead Authors, but who else had input into that decision?
For the SOD, see http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/AR4/SOD/Ch03.pdf at p. 20 of 65, lines 32 – 40.
Cheers.
Re: UK John says:
December 6, 2011 at 9:48 am
Nicholas Stern is an economist who makes predictions about the future climate.
=====================================================================
No, it’s worse than that – he takes his future climate advice from Julia Slingo of the Met. Office and we all know how ‘successful’ her climate models are –
It was Julia Slingo who last year was telling us here in the UK that the severely cold winter was simply a localised event when the reality was that much of the world experienced record low temperatures.
It was also Met Office computer simulations that cost our aeronautical industry billions when airspace was closed due to predictions of volcanic ash dangers from an icelandic volcano, unnecessarily as it turned out.
But then of course the Reality is usually very different from the Met Office predictions – it is considered something of a joke here in the UK except it can have very tragic consequences.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our FOIA friend has identified a number of his Readme quotes (including the first) as from the MetOffice.
The ‘science’ is utterly politicised – it is not science driving the politics but politics driving the ‘science’.
The political message is paramount – that is after all what they’ve paid for and of course their ‘propaganda by proxy’ with NGO funding.
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/43291
“Hayley Fowler writes: “I am not sure that this is true for the very large Karakoram glaciers in
the western Himalaya. Hewitt (2005) suggests from measurements that these are expanding –
and this would certainly be explained by climatic change in preciptiation and temperature
trends seen in the Karakoram region (Fowler and Archer, J Climate in press; Archer and
Fowler, 2004)
Precipitation is the other (than temperature) main determinant of glacier advance/retreat.
One of the few things we can be confident in about in a warmer world, is the Indian monsoon will be more intense with higher Himalayan precipitation.
Therefore, it is far from clear how much glaciers will retreat and even whether they will retreat at all. In recent years some New Zealand glaciers have advanced due to increased precipitation.
Interestingly, there is no increasing trend in Indian Monsoon rainfall.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/314/5804/1442.abstract
Silly Ban Must Ban Debate
Ban Ki-moon screams: “it’s
difficult to overstate
the great gravity
of global warming!
We cannot exaggerate
how dangerously
our future’s threatened!
But don’t mention Climategate—
that’s nothing to me.”
One Cause of Alarm
Himalayan ice
melts at an alarming rate:
Indians must flee!
Of fifty thousand
glaciers, say, ten abate—
vast calamity!
Such small samples will
suffice to extrapolate
a catastrophe.
We have to think globally and act locally, I suppose. Any thoughts?
http://www.7billionactions.org/story/1187-steven-earl-salmony
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KkmFuM77qU
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
Chapel Hill, NC
John Marshall said:
December 5, 2011 at 2:05 am
WWF also likes to use cute animal pictures, and makes claims that donors can save the animals by making a monthly donation to WWF.
I think this is a fraud though. The animals that the donations are saving are the animals who run the WWF, and they aren’t nearly as cute as the tigers and bears shown in the pictures..
@Ian. Thanks for your link. First, you’re correct that the SOD is the last commented version. There is a final review of the by governments, but only of the “Summary for Policymakers.” Donna Laframboise discusses it in Chaper 21, “What’s a nice scientist like you doing in a place like this?”
I hadn’t realized that the SOD (“Second Order Draft,” presumably) was available online. However, the specific link you gave was to the chapter from the Fresh Water Group, which didn’t include the Stern-citing passage in its final version. It was the Asia Group that did that.
I checked what the Asia Group had said in the same document, at http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/AR4/SOD/Ch10.pdf . The relevant section is 10.4.2.1, pp. 27–28, starting at line 34. The passage that DL and I criticized for citing only Stern does not exist in that document, nor does anything like it. I.e., there was no mention of the number of people affected by water shortages. There were no mentions of the Stern Review anywhere in its chapter (10).
This is in line with the accusations of Donna Laframboise. (I don’t remember her giving a link to any IPCC draft documents to cinch her case, though.) In Chapter 14, “The Stern Review Scandal,” at Kindle location 771, she wrote:
So the point you’ve raised stands, namely:
Presumably one or more of the Coordinating Lead Authors, such as Lal, would have been informed of any such last-minute changes. In addition, Lal was the front man for the IPCC during the controversies over the 2035 claim and over the Stern Review citation, so he’s the likeliest suspect.
If he did, it would blacken the mark against the IPCC, because it would indicate that higher-ups were involved. A further blackening would occur if it turned out that he was in fact the instigator, as I now suspect. I think that he would have had a Motive to do so because the Stern Review was published at the end of October 2006, shortly after the September 15 deadline for Second Review comments, and therefore well before final publication of AR4. It would have been tempting to use it to spice up the AR. He had the other ingredients needed: Means and Opportunity.
What we’ve found supports Donna’s speculations. So Lal should be asked these questions by a journalist (Donna?), by e-mail:
And then he should be asked these worm-can openers:
If he admits that last-minute changes were common, or makes other embarrassing admissions, that would open the door to further investigation of IPCC procedures and would further blacken the IPCC’s reputation. If he denies it, that might make things even blacker, in the long run. Let’s get him on the record.
A computerized document comparison between the SOD and the final Report might yield interesting findings that would require some wiggling to explain.
@Salmony Yawn. Give Ehrlich a call. Maybe you two can discuss your correct predictions.