Recycled: 2035 Himalayan Glacier Claim

The 2035 error was not a typo. The guy who exposed this error, a New Scientist journalist named Pearce who printed Hasnain’s claim initially after interviewing him, first suspected the mistake was the result of a typo from 2350 in a Russian report, and printed that. But a few weeks later he discovered, from tracking down the reference in the IPCC report to its ultimate source, that it had come, via New Scientist and the WWF, from an Indian scientist’s speculation, or horseback diagnosis. So his first guess, that it was due to a typo, has been superseded. Not even the IPCC uses that as an excuse.
Pachauri didn’t immediately retract the error when informed of it, despite what some comments near the top say.
Here’s a summary of the situation I posted here 3 or 4 years ago:

Pierrehumbert said:
“Note that the IPCC blunder on Himalayan glaciers — something that really did reveal problems (though not fatal ones) in IPCC procedures — was outed first by professional glaciologists, both within and outside the IPCC. i.e. REAL SCIENTISTS, not noisemakers.”

It was noticed first, but it was ignored for years, not only by the IPCC’s officials, but by the climatological community and environmental journalists. If it hadn’t been for the threat of online critics & a renegade journalist truly “outing” the situation (into the larger world), the coverup might (IMO) have continued. (See the boldfaced phrase below.) Therefore, the IPCC’s behavior was worse than a blunder–it was a crime. I.e., a bad-faith suppressio veri effort.
So Pierrehumbert’s characterization of it as a mere blunder is spin—at best. Below is a summary of the background of the situation that I posted (in separate comments) on WUWT at the time.
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Wakefield: “The authors of the IPCC report in this regard have admitted the error and did so before the blogosphere got wind of it,”

It’s true that the error was dug out by Cogley, an IPCC accomplice, and by Fred Pearce, a red-hot warmist journalist who wrote for New Scientist, rather than by a blogger. However, saying the IPCC acted before the blogosphere put them up to it incorrectly hints that the IPCC would have taken action if it hadn’t feared that Pearce or Cogley would go public, perhaps via the bloggers, if a correction wasn’t made. The IPCC’s record prior to that point was one of denial and coverup as long as it thought it could get away with it:
1. Haisnain, the WWF, and I presume other IPCCers in attendance, ignored glacier expert Gwyn Rees’s 2004 UK-government-funded debunking of rapid-melting claims and his speech warning that Haisnan’s 2035 date was ridiculous. He forced New Scientist to publish a retraction in 2004 after it had published Haisnan’s claim that Rees’s study was alarmist about the melting rate, so this was widely known:

From The Sunday Times — January 31, 2010
Panel ignored warnings on glacier error
Jonathan Leake
Another warning came from Gwyn Rees, a British hydrologist who oversaw a £300,000 study funded by the UK government in 2001 to assess the claims about rapid melt.
His findings were published in 2004 — three years before the IPCC report — and also showed there was no risk of rapid melt.
Rees said: “The sheer size and altitude of these glaciers made it highly unlikely they would melt by 2035.”
The new revelations follow a report in The Sunday Times this month which forced the IPCC to retract its claim that the glaciers in the Himalayas might be gone by 2035.
They raise more questions about why the IPCC ever took the claim seriously. It means the UN panel ignored scientific publications rejecting the rapid-melt theory in favour of claims that had been reported only in the non-scientific media and in a report by WWF, a conservation pressure group.
The saga began with Syed Hasnain, the Indian glaciologist who issued the first warnings about rapid glacier melt in media interviews in 1999. He now works for The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in Delhi, which is run by Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC.
It was those claims that prompted Britain to fund the study by Rees — who recruited Hasnain to help lead it.
Rees, a water resource scientist at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, a government research centre, said Hasnain had signed up to the study’s conclusions. These stated that any suggestions the region’s glaciers might soon melt “would seem unfounded”.
Hasnain was also in the audience at a seminar sponsored by the EU in 2004 where Rees gave a presentation suggesting there would be some glacial melt, but nothing on the scale suggested by Hasnain. His closing slide read: “It is unlikely that all glaciers will vanish by 2035!”
That same audience also included representatives from WWF who were compiling their own report on glacier melt. Despite Rees’s warnings, they later decided to include Hasnain’s claims in their report, published in 2005, from where they were picked up by the IPCC.
In 2004, Rees had assumed the rapid-melt claims would not be repeated, but in May that year Hasnain gave an interview to New Scientist suggesting the UK-funded study had confirmed his claims of rapid glacier melt.
In it he said: “Global warming has already increased glacier melting by up to 30%. After 40 years, most glaciers will be wiped out and we will have severe water problems.”
A furious Rees made the magazine publish a retraction in its letters page, describing Hasnain’s comments as a “gross misrepresentation”.
This weekend it emerged that the leaders of the IPCC had known for weeks and probably months about the error and had even convened private conferences to discuss it.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7009707.ece

2. Raised-eyebrow comments during the review process from Japan and others about the source etc. of 2035 were dealt with perfunctorily. Only a citation of the WWF article was added.

New Documents Show IPCC Ignored Doubts About Himalayan Glacier Scare
Sunday, 24 January 2010
The contentious 2035 date appears in the paragraph from lines 13 to 17 on page 46 of the second order draft of Working Group II. The only changes to the draft text in the finally published text are the removal of a short redundant sentence and the addition the reference to (WWF, 2005).
David Saltz, of the Desert Research Institute, Ben Gurion University made three comments on this short paragraph including one upon the obvious inconsistency of saying first that the likelihood is very high that Himalayan glaciers will “disappear” by 2035 if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate, and then stating “Its total area will shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035”. The Lead Author’s response to the comment on inconsistency was:
“Missed to clarify this one”.
The Government of Japan commented rather more critically:
“This seems to be a very important statement, possibly should be in the SPM, but is buried in the middle of this chapter. What is the confidence level/certainty? (i.e.“the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing is very high” is at which level of likelihood? (ref. to Box TS-1, “Description of Likelihood”). Also in this paragraph, the use of “will” is ambiguous and should be replaced with appropriate likelihood/confidence level terminology.”
The Lead Authors’ response to Government of Japan was:
“Appropriate revisions and editing made”.
From what I can see the Lead Authors found none appropriate.
The paragraph, following the 2035 claim and table 10.10, begins:
“The receding and thinning of Himalayan glaciers can be attributed primarily to the global warming due to increase in anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases.”
Hayley Fowler from Newcastle University commented with citations:
“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 Lead Authors responded:
“Was unable to get hold of the suggested references will consider in the final version”
The Government of Japan again noted the lack of any reference and commented rather critically:
“This statement lacks any reference. Also, the reader wonders, are “global warming” and “climate change” interchangeable? Are we still using “global warming”? Clarification of this would be appreciated.”
“The use of “will” (again) is ambiguous. The confidence level using IPCC terminology should be stated.”
The Lead Author’s response to Government of Japan was once again:
“Appropriate revisions and editing made”.
But once again none were made either in response to Hayley Fowler or the Government of Japan.
For the IPCC TSU, Clare Hanson commented that there was only one reference for the whole section. This was Hasnain, 2002. To Clare Hanson the Lead Authors’ response was:
“More references added”.
So far as I can tell only Shen et al., 2002 and WWF, 2005 were added.
http://www.thegwpf.org/international-news/459-new-documents-show-ipcc-ignored-doubts-about-himalayan-glacier-scare.html

3. Lead Author Georg Kaser’s e-mail to the IPCC’s technical support team prior to publication about 2035 was ignored.

Roger Pielke, Jr. — 18 January 2010
Stranger and Stranger
The fallout from the IPCC Himalayan glacier situation gets stranger and stranger. Now an IPCC lead author has stepped forward claiming that the error has been known by the IPCC all along. From Agence France-Presse:

A top scientist said Monday he had warned in 2006 that a prediction of catastrophic loss of Himalayan glaciers, published months later by the UN’s Nobel-winning climate panel, was badly wrong.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report said in 2007 it was “very likely” that the glaciers, which supply water to more than a billion people across Asia, would vanish by 2035 if global warming trends continued.
“This number is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of magnitude,” said Georg Kaser, an expert in tropical glaciology at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
“It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing,” he told AFP in an interview.
…………
Kaser said some of the scientists from other regional groups took heed of suggestions, and made corrections ahead of final publication in April 2007.
But the Asia group did not. “I pointed it out,” he said of the implausible prediction on the glaciers.
“For a reason I do not know, they did not react.”
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/01/stranger-and-stranger.html

Here’s the IPCC’s excuse for how it dropped the ball:

January 25, 2010, 6:02 pm
Explanation Offered for Error in U.N. Climate Report
By JAMES KANTER
The official, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a vice chairman of the climate change panel, said that a glaciologist, Georg Kaser at the University of Innsbruck, in Austria, had sought to correct the information about the glaciers before it was published by the panel but that the correction came too late and never reached the people who could fix the statement.
“It’s very unfortunate,” Dr. van Ypersele said, because Dr. Kaser “actually provided the correct information, but not to the correct person.”
The lead authors “didn’t, from my understanding, get the caveats that would have been useful,” Dr. van Ypersele said.
He added that he had examined records of e-mail messages and found that the authors had never received the pertinent message from Dr. Kaser. Furthermore, Dr. Kaser’s “most pointed criticism” of the findings on glacial melting came after the contents of the report had been completed, Dr. van Ypersele said.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/explanation-offered-for-error-in-un-climate-report/

4. Lead Author Georg Kaser’s letter to Asia group head Dr. Lal was ignored. (Lal said in response that he never got it. A “likely story,” IMO.)

Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn’t been verified
By David Rose
Last updated at 12:54 AM on 24th January 2010
Last week, Professor Georg Kaser, a glacier expert from Austria, who was lead author of a different chapter in the IPCC report, said when he became aware of the 2035 claim a few months before the report was published, he wrote to Dr Lal, urging him to withdraw it as patently untrue.
Dr Lal claimed he never received this letter. ‘He didn’t contact me or any of the other authors of the chapter,’ he said.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245636/Glacier-scientists-says-knew-data-verified.html#

5. In early November ChooChoo scornfully dismissed the correction in the report issued by VK Raina of India’s Geological Survey, calling it voodoo science. Here’s WUWT’s thread on the matter then:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/11/pachauri-claims-indian-scientific-position-arrogant/

6. Later in November ChooChoo was informed about the error by Pavlia Bagla but he took no action. This is in line with the IPCC’s hear-no-evil precedents described above. Here’s a story by Andrew Bolt summarizing the matter:

Pachauri lied about Himalayan warning
Andrew Bolt — Saturday, January 30, 2010
Rajendra Pachauri, head of the increasingly suspect IPCC, is caught out lying and now must surely go:
Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it…
Dr Pachauri … told The [London] Times on January 22 that he had only known about the error for a few days. He said: “I became aware of this when it was reported in the media about ten days ago. Before that, it was really not made known. Nobody brought it to my attention. There were statements, but we never looked at this 2035 number.”
Asked whether he had deliberately kept silent about the error to avoid embarrassment at (his IPCC) Copenhagen (summit last December), he said: “That’s ridiculous. It never came to my attention before the Copenhagen summit…”
However, a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error…
Dr Pachauri had previously dismissed a report by the Indian Government which said that glaciers might not be melting as much as had been feared. He described the report, which did not mention the 2035 error, as “voodoo science”.
Mr Bagla said he had informed Dr Pachauri that Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University and a leading glaciologist, had dismissed the 2035 date as being wrong by at least 300 years. Professor Cogley believed the IPCC had misread the date in a 1996 report which said the glaciers could melt significantly by 2350. [This was his first guess at the source of the error. later he realized it came from Haisnan.–RK]
Mr Pallava interviewed Dr Pachauri again this week for Science… In the taped interview, Mr Pallava asked: “I pointed it out [the error] to you in several e-mails, several discussions, yet you decided to overlook it. Was that so that you did not want to destabilise what was happening in Copenhagen?”
As I wrote last week, more telling than even the IPCC’s bizarre Himalayan error has been Pachauri’s instinctive reaction to deny and abuse those pointing out such mistakes.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/pachauri_lied_about_himalayan_warning#66326

PS: Don’t forget that the IPCC not only printed the wrong date, but backed it up by rating the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing as “very high”—i.e., more than 90 per cent.
Further, although all the experts except Kaser failed to try to get this corrected afterwards (too good a story to spoil?), this was not something that others overlooked:

that error has been regurgitated ad nauseam. Although Professor Cogley did not notice it, when the 2007 IPCC report was published, the 2035 date was dutifully reported by newspapers all over the world, and became the subject of much Jeffrey Simpson-style brow-knitting.
http://www.nationalpost.com/related/links/story.html?id=2461595&p=2
…………….
The 2035 date was an alarming, attention-grabbing finding — and many journalists, including Stephan Faris last year in Foreign Policy, cited it as evidence that global warming is an urgent crisis.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/09/inside_the_climate_bunker?page=full

Incidentally, the passage above continues with some interesting background material:

But, after the Indian government released its own report with conflicting glacier-melt data last fall, glacier scientists went back to the IPCC report and began to raise questions about the 2035 date. The chatter among experts was picked up in Science magazine last year, before spilling into the mainstream media ….

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PPS: Here is a piece of a letter to the London Times. It contradicts Wakefield’s proxy claim that the IPCC made a good-faith error:

Sir, Dr Vicky Pope’s defence of the robustness of “the science” of climate change is too comprehensive (Commentary, Jan 28).
………………
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “mistakes” that Dr Pope refers to are no ordinary errors. They show a deliberate disregard for the principles of scientific objectivity. The IPCC had every reason to know that its account of the Himalayan glacier melting was misleading, just as it had every reason to know that its predictions of hurricane frequency and intensity were both unsubstantiated and implausible.
Lord Leach of Fairford
London EC3

Here’s another comment, on dot.earth, that indicates the great usefulness this 2035 “error” had for the alarmist cause:

Barry Youngerman
The big question has always been, is the danger so immediate that we must “do something right now.” For me, that bogus 2035 date is not a minor matter; it gets to the heart of the issue.

And here’s a WUWT comment that’s another indication that it was “no accident” that the IPCC made the 2035 “error”:

ScientistForTruth (15:15:06) :
I demonstrate conclusively that the scientific community knew about these Glaciergate errors by their being exposed in a peer-reviewed journal in 2005, which was essentially the substance of a chapter from a book published in 2004 by an authority on the Himalayas. Syed Hasnain’s pronouncements are shown to be myths, and worse. The paper appeared in Himalayan Journal of Sciences, entitled
“Himalayan misconceptions and distortions: What are the facts? Himalayan Delusions: Who’s kidding who and why — Science at the service of media, politics and the development agencies.”
In light of that, I find it almost certain that Pachauri and a lot of others knew that these were lies years before AR4 was published.
http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/un-ipcc-rotting-from-the-head-down

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PPPS: Here’s more background info., from an earlier WUWTer:

R.S.Brown (00:54:37) :
Anthony,
Mr. Rajendra Pachauri was dumping on a paper that utilized data drawn from numerous University, College Departmental studies, Institute reports, and colloquiums done over the years. There are 18 citations toward the end, most of them peer-reviewed (but not by the IPCC “Team”) and written by the folks who have been studying the Himalayan glaciers up close and personally for years.
Here’s the difficult-to-find link to the Government of India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests Discussion Paper, “Himalayan Glaciers – A State-of-Art Review of Glacial Studies, Glacial Retreat and Climate Change” edited by V.K.Raina, the former Deputy Director of the Geological Survey of India:
http://moef.nic.in/downloads/public-information/MoEF%20Discussion%20Paper%20_him.pdf
Raga on. \ / Ray Brown

More criticism of the good-faith-error defense:

Economic Times, India: IPCC imperialism on Indian glaciers
by Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar
It speaks volumes for the huge biases within IPCC that it took two years for this hoax to be exposed. Any hoax opposing the global warming thesis would be exposed in ten seconds flat. The IPCC is willing to swallow unexamined what it finds convenient, while raising a thousand technical objections to anything inconvenient. This is religious crusading, not objective science. The tactics being used to discredit and destroy heretics is reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition.
The Indian panel, headed by V K Raina, looked at 150 years of data gathered by the Geological Survey of India from 25 Himalayan glaciers. It was the first comprehensive study of the region. It concluded that while Himalayan glaciers had long been retreating, there was no recent acceleration of the trend, and nothing to suggest that the glaciers would disappear. In short, the IPCC had perpetrated an alarmist hoax without scientific foundation.
…..
Raina said that the mistake made by western scientists “was to apply the rate of glacial loss from other parts of the world to the Himalayas… In the United States the highest glaciers in Alaska are still below the lowest level of Himalayan glaciers. Our 9,500 glaciers are located at very high altitudes. It is a completely different system.”
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/swaminathan-s-a-aiyar/IPCC-imperialism-on-Indian-glaciers/articleshow/5478293.cms

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bubbagyro says:
June 18, 2011 at 12:50 pm
To sum up what Roger said, in a nutshell, it is the cover-up that attests to the seriousness of the crime.
D. Patterson says:
June 18, 2011 at 2:16 pm
Roger Knights says:
June 18, 2011 at 11:08 am
That’s quite a summary. Thank you for presenting it.