- "Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world." Cogley and Michael Zemp of the World Glacier Monitoring System said Himalayan glaciers are melting at about the same rate as other glaciers.
- It says that if the Earth continues to warm, the "likelihood of them disappearing by 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high." Nowhere in peer-reviewed science literature is 2035 mentioned. However, there is a study from Russia that says glaciers could come close to disappearing by 2350. Probably the numbers in the date were transposed, Cogley said.
- The paragraph says: "Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometers by the year 2035." Cogley said there are only 33,000 square kilometers of glaciers in the Himalayas.
- The entire paragraph is attributed to the World Wildlife Fund, when only one sentence came from the WWF, Cogley said. And further, the IPCC likes to brag that it is based on peer-reviewed science, not advocacy group reports. Cogley said the WWF cited the popular science press as its source.
- A table says that between 1845 and 1965, the Pindari Glacier shrank by 2,840 meters. Then comes a math mistake: It says that's a rate of 135.2 meters a year, when it really is only 23.5 meters a year.
20 January 2010
UN IPCC AR4 Errors on Himalayan Glaciers Revealed
An article in the Seattle Times by Seth Borenstein notes that numerous claims made about the melting of glaciers in the Himalayan Mountains in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 were wrong. As usual, all of the errors made it appear that global warming was much more dire than it actually is. Here are the errors in a half page of the report:
The Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh says that some glaciers are expanding and others are receding more slowly than indicated in the UN IPCC report. But secondly, note that an Indian scientist did speculate, not in a published paper, that the Himalayan glaciers might vanish by 2035. He says his speculation should not have been used in the UN IPCC report. Note that losing 400,000 square kilometers of glacier by 2035 is a much greater loss of sources of fresh water than is the loss of some fraction of the 33,000 square kilometers of actual Himalayan glacier and a much greater contributor to images of sea level rise. The error on calculating the rate of retreat of the Pindari Glacier is especially foolish, since it was particularly easy for any reader to check the calculation. The article rate of 23.5 meters/year is also actually wrong. The rate is really 23.7 meters/year.
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