The City Square: UN IPCC claims of melting Himalayan glaciers exposed as fraud

Sunday, January 17, 2010

UN IPCC claims of melting Himalayan glaciers exposed as fraud

The (UK) Sunday Times reports today that one of the UN IPCC's "central claims" will likely be retracted after it was exposed as one man's mere "speculation" and not based on any formal research:

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.
Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.
In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.
It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research.

I would have classified this as being mere sloppiness on the part on the UN until I read:

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". The IPCC defines this as having a probability of greater than 90%. [Emph. added]