PlanetArk 21 Jan 10;
OSLO - The U.N. panel of climate scientists expressed regret on Wednesday for exaggerating how quickly Himalayan glaciers are melting in a report that wrongly projected that they could all vanish by 2035.
Leaders of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) "regret the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures in this instance," they said in a statement on the flaw in a paragraph of a 938-page scientific report.
They noted that the projection of a thaw by 2035 did not make it to the final summary for policymakers in its latest report in 2007. The summary projected a faster thaw in the coming years for glaciers from the Andes to the Alps.
India and some climate researchers have criticized the IPCC in recent days for over-stating the shrinking of Himalayan glaciers, whose seasonal thaw helps to supply water to nations including China and India.
A disappearance of the glaciers would badly disrupt flows in Asia that are vital for irrigation. The IPCC leaders said they were strongly committed to ensuring a high standard for the reports.
The offending paragraph says: "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world 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."
On Monday, Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said that "glaciers are receding, but the report that glaciers will vanish by 2035 is not based on an iota of scientific evidence."
The IPCC statement said that the 2035 projection was based on "poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession" and that proper checks were not made.
The IPCC's core finding in 2007 was that it was more than 90 percent sure that mankind is the main cause of global warming, mainly by using fossil fuels.
UN climate panel admits Himalaya glacier data "poorly substantiated"
Yahoo News 20 Jan 10;
GENEVA (AFP) – The UN's climate science panel acknowledged on Wednesday that a grim prediction on the fate of Himalayan glaciers that featured in a benchmark report on global warming had been "poorly substantiated" and was a lapse in standards.
Charges that the reference was highly inaccurate or overblown have stoked pressure on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), already assailed in a separate affair involving hacked email exchanges.
The new row focuses on a paragraph in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, a 938-page opus whose warning in 2007 that climate change was on the march spurred politicians around the world to vow action.
The paragraph notably declared the probability of glaciers in the Himalayas "disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high."
The IPCC said in a statement that the paragraph "refers to poorly substantiated rates of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers."
"In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly," the panel admitted.
It added: "The Chair, Vice Chair and Co Chairs of the IPCC regret the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures in this instance.
"This episode demonstrates that the quality of the assessment depends on absolute adherence to the IPCC standards, including thorough review of 'the quality and validity of each source before incorporating results from the source in an IPCC report'."
The statement noted that the reference was not repeated in an important "synthesis report" of the 2007 assessment, and stressed the IPCC's "strong commitment" to thorough, accurate review of scientific data.
The IPCC co-won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for bringing climate change to the world's attention through a reputation for rigour, caution and fact-checking. Under this process, data are peer reviewed by other scientists and are then meant to be double-checked by editors.
In an exceptional move, the lapses came under public attack from four prominent glaciologists and hydrologists in a letter to the prestigious US journal Science.
They said the paragraph's mistakes derived from a report by green group WWF which picked up a news report based on an unpublished study, compounded by the accidental inversion of a date -- 2035 instead of 2350 -- in a Russian paper published in 1996.
"These errors could have been avoided had the norms of scientific publication, including peer review and concentration upon peer-reviewed work, been respected," according to the letter, which Science released on Wednesday, two days ahead of scheduled publication.
One of the letter's authors was Austrian specialist Georg Kaser, who contributed to a different section of the 2007 report.
He told AFP on Monday that the mistake was enormous and that he had notified IPCC colleagues of it months before publication.
Despite the controversy, the IPCC stood by the overall conclusions about glacier loss this century in major mountain ranges, including the Himalayas.
The report concluded that "widespread mass losses from glaciers and reductions in snow cover over recent decades are projected to accelerate throughout the 21st century."
That would reduce "water availability, hydropower potential, and changing seasonality of flows in regions supplied by meltwater from major mountain ranges (e.g. Hindu-Kush, Himalaya, Andes), where more than one-sixth of the world population currently lives," it added.
IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri on Tuesday defended the panel's overall work, a position shared by other scientists, who say the core conclusions about climate change are incontrovertible.
"Theoretically, let's say we slipped up on one number, I don't think it takes anything away from the overwhelming scientific evidence of what's happening with the climate of this Earth," Pachauri said.
Skeptics have already attacked the panel over so-called "Climategate," entailing stolen email exchanges among IPCC experts which they say reflected attempts to skew the evidence for global warming.
The row came as the UN panel began the marathon process of drafting its Fifth Assessment Reports, inviting scientists to lead its work.
The reports, due out in 2013 and 2014, will focus on sea level changes, the influence of periodic climate patterns like the monsoon season and El Nino, and forge a more precise picture of the regional effects of climate change.
UN climate report riddled with errors on glaciers
Seth Borenstein, Associated Press Yahoo News 21 Jan 10;
WASHINGTON – Five glaring errors were discovered in one paragraph of the world's most authoritative report on global warming, forcing the Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists who wrote it to apologize and promise to be more careful.
The errors are in a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N.-affiliated body. All the mistakes appear in a subsection that suggests glaciers in the Himalayas could melt away by the year 2035 — hundreds of years earlier than the data actually indicates. The year 2350 apparently was transposed as 2035.
The climate panel and even the scientist who publicized the errors said they are not significant in comparison to the entire report, nor were they intentional. And they do not negate the fact that worldwide, glaciers are melting faster than ever.
But the mistakes open the door for more attacks from climate change skeptics.
"The credibility of the IPCC depends on the thoroughness with which its procedures are adhered to," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, told The Associated Press in an e-mail. "The procedures have been violated in this case. That must not be allowed to happen again because the credibility of climate change policy can only be based on credible science."
The incident follows a furor late last year over the release of stolen e-mails in which climate scientists talked about suppressing data and freezing out skeptics of global warming. And on top of that, an intense cold spell has some people questioning whether global warming exists.
In a statement, the climate change panel expressed regret over what it called "poorly substantiated estimates" about the Himalayan glaciers.
"The IPCC has established a reputation as a real gold standard in assessment; this is an unfortunate black mark," said Chris Field, a Stanford University professor who in 2008 took over as head of this part of the IPCC research. "None of the experts picked up on the fact that these were poorly substantiated numbers. From my perspective, that's an area where we have an opportunity to do much better."
Patrick Michaels, a global warming skeptic and scholar at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, called on the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, to resign, adding: "I'd like to know how such an absurd statement made it through the review process. It is obviously wrong."
However, a number of scientists, including some critics of the IPCC, said the mistakes do not invalidate the main conclusion that global warming is without a doubt man-made and a threat.
The mistakes were found not by skeptics like Michaels, but by a few of the scientists themselves, including one who is an IPCC co-author.
The report in question is the second of four issued by the IPCC in 2007 on global warming. This 838-page document had chapters on each continent. The errors were in a half-page section of the Asia chapter. The section got it wrong as to how fast the thousands of glaciers in the Himalayas are melting, scientists said.
"It is a very shoddily written section," said Graham Cogley, a professor of geography and glaciers at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada, who brought the error to everyone's attention. "It wasn't copy-edited properly."
Cogley, who wrote a letter about the problems to Science magazine that was published online Wednesday, cited these mistakes:
• The paragraph starts, "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 the 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.
Still, Cogley said: "I'm convinced that the great bulk of the work reported in the IPCC volumes was trustworthy and is trustworthy now as it was before the detection of this mistake." He credited Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon with telling him about the errors.
However, Colorado University environmental science and policy professor Roger Pielke Jr. said the errors point to a "systematic breakdown in IPCC procedures," and that means there could be more mistakes.
A number of scientists pointed out that at the end of the day, no one is disputing the Himalayan glaciers are shrinking.
"What is happening now is comparable with the Titanic sinking more slowly than expected," de Boer said in his e-mail. "But that does not alter the inevitable consequences, unless rigorous action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is taken."
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