Himalayan Glaciers Not Melting

Tim Blair writes:

It’s now five years since debate about climate change officially ended, yet debate continues somehow. The latest focus is upon an IPCC-approved claim that the Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035 – a claim that may now be withdrawn:

"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 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. "

But that news story must itself have had some rigorous science behind it, right? Wrong:

"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."

Still, Hasnain is a scientist, so he wouldn’t have just been offering idle speculation, would he? He would:

"Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research."

Yet surely the IPCC had the sense to review this claim and not overplay it? They didn’t:

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%.

The London Times summarises: “If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research.” Which is saying something. More from Walter Russell Mead:

"If evidence this slender was sufficient to convince the IPCC that this threat was real, it’s clear that the panel is more like Chicken Little than a serious source of scientific information. "

Something is falling, but it isn’t the sky.