Himalayan glacier claim undermines IPCC
Updated on 21 January 2010
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is forced to admit it was wrong when it claimed Himalayan glaciers would probably disappear by 2035. Julian Rush reports on the source of the claim.
It was an eye-catching claim -
"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).”
[IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, 2007, Working Group II Report, Chapter 10 Section 6.2]
But it's wrong, as the IPCC have now finally grudgingly admitted, months after scientists first challenged them about it.
And the IPCC's reluctance to acknowledge the mistake has done serious damage to the organisation's credibility at a time when climate scepticism is on the rise in the wake of the row of the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia and the inconclusive outcome of the Copenhagen Climate Conference.
So where did it come from? And how did it get past the IPCC's rigorous review process, that involves every line checked and double-checked by hundreds of scientists and government officials from around the world? After some detective work, Channel 4 News can reveal what happened.
Though the original drafts, which I've seen, don't source the statement, the IPCC eventually attributed it to a report by the environmental group WWF when asked to by reviewers. The WWF report from 2005, An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China in turn said:
"In 1999, a report by the Working Group on Himalayan Glaciology (WGHG) of the International Commission for Snow and Ice (ICSI) stated: 'glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the livelihood[sic] of them disappearing by the year 2035 is very high."
Yesterday WWF added a correction to their report, saying it was used in good faith, but that it should be disregarded.
The WWF report also referred to an article in New Scientist from 5 June 1999 ("Flooded Out - Retreating glaciers spell disaster for valley communities") saying the then chairman of ICSI, Professor Syed Hasnain, had been quoted in it as saying most of the glaciers in the Himalayan region "will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming."
The same ICSI report was also quoted in an article in an online publication called Down to Earth in an article published on 30 April 1999 titled "Glaciers Beating Retreat" which said -
"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 is very high," says the International Commission for Snow and Ice (ICSI ) in its recent study on Asian glaciers. "But if the Earth keeps getting warmer at the current rate, it might happen much sooner," says Syed Iqbal Hasnain of the School of Environmental Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Hasnain is also the chairperson of the Working Group on Himalayan Glaciology (WGHG), constituted in 1995 by the ICSI. "The glacier will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates. Its total area will shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square km by the year 2035,"says former ICSI president V M Kotlyakov in the report "Variations of snow and ice in the past and present on a global and regional scale".
Rick Piltz, of the website climatesciencwatch noted something curious. The words highlighted in bold match almost exactly the words used by the IPCC suggesting this may actually be the original source!
And here's where the trouble begins. The ICSI report, written by Professor Syed Hasnain, does NOT say what WWF or Down to Earth claimed.
It gets worse: the report by Kotlyakov actually says -
“The extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates — its total area will shrink from 500,000 to 100,000 km² by the year 2350. Glaciers will survive only in the mountains of inner Alaska, on some Arctic archipelagos, within Patagonian ice sheets, in the Karakoram Mountains, in the Himalayas, in some regions of Tibet and on the highest mountain peaks in the temperature [sic] [temperate] latitudes.”
That's 2350, not 2035. Looks like a typo crept in somewhere!
And note that the area he refers to is all the glaciers in the world except those at the poles and he says the Himalayan glaciers will survive!
In its defence, the IPCC says the claim does not appear in the key document from its Fourth Assessment Report, the Synthesis Report, which has a correct, more general statement on the impact of melting glaciers on the future availability of water, and it says it "regrets" its review failures.
But the damage has been done, and it has been compounded both by the unwillingness of the IPCC to admit the mistake and their glacially slow response to the issue. They were first challenged about this in November last year when the Indian government published a report contradicting the IPCC claim about the Himalayan glaciers. The IPCC chair, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, himself an Indian, and Professor Hasnain both reacted angrily and dismissively to that - the phrase "voodoo science" was allegedly used.
Of course, if this is the only mistake in a 3000 page long report then it is testament to the thorough way the IPCC goes about its business. But they do need to learn a basic lesson of public relations: get your response in hard and fast. If they'd put their hands up to this last year, then this row would never have escalated to be so damaging in the way that it has.
