Some people will believe anything!This bit of investigative "journalism" traces the source of the "research" which is the basis for the outlandish IPCC claim above. The author is a Professor at Texas A&M University and also Texas State Climatologist
atmo.tamu.edu/profile/JNielsen-GammonBy the way, there WILL still be glaciers in the Himalayas in 2035!Posted by John Nielsen-Gammon at 12/22/2009 12:05 AM CST
Lost amid the news coverage of Copenhagen and Climategate was the assertion that one of the more attention-grabbing statements of the IPCC AR4 was flat-out wrong:
"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 AR4 WG2 Ch10, p. 493)(Before following any of the links below, I suggest reading my blog entry all the way through. Also, I'll be approving comments only sporadically during the holiday season, so please be patient.)
Roger Pielke Sr.'s blog seems to have broken the news via a guest posting by Madhav Khandekar, and the BBC published a more extensive article on the subject, which seems to have been pretty much ignored since then by the media but has been noted by a few blogs. Khandekar, the BBC, and I all rely on J. Graham Cogley, a glaciologist in the Department of Geography at Trent University, Ontario for pointing this out. Cogley and three colleagues have written a letter to Nature on this subject, and I've since corresponded with Cogley by email.
Both Khandekar and Cogley seem to blame the error on a misreading by the IPCC authors, but I think this is incorrect. The truth is quite a bit more interesting, and the evidence is in the written documents. Let's have a look.
The IPCC report lists a single reference for the paragraph: WWF 2005. This turns out to be a World Wildlife Fund project report (PDF) that was not peer-reviewed. This is a problem; the IPCC is supposed to rely only on the peer-reviewed literature. The WWF report says:
"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”. Direct observation of a select few snout positions out of the thousands of Himalayan glaciers indicate that they have been in a general state of decline over, at least, the past 150 years.
The prediction that “glaciers in the region will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming” and that the flow of Himalayan rivers will “eventually diminish, resulting in widespread water shortages” (New Scientist 1999; 1999, 2003) is equally disturbing." (WWF 2005)
This is another problem: the WWF report is only quoting another source, so not only is it not peer-reviewed, it is a secondary source. This leads to the danger that the WWF has not quoted the primary sources completely correctly. (And where did that 500,000 to 100,000 shrinkage come from?) The primary sources are stated to be a 1999 report by WGHG/ICSI and what turns out to be a 1999 article in New Scientist magazine. The latter source wouldn't even be acceptable as a primary source, but let's see what it says:
"A new study, due to be presented in July to the International Commission on Snow and Ice (ICSI), predicts that most of the glaciers in the region will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming. "All the glaciers in the middle Himalayas are retreating," says Syed Hasnain of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, the chief author of the ICSI report....Hasnain's four-year study indicates that all the glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas could disappear by 2035 at their present rate of decline....Hasnain's working group on Himalayan glaciology, set up by the ICSI, has found that glaciers are receding faster in the Himalayas than anywhere else on Earth. Hasnain warns that as the glaciers disappear, the flow of these rivers will become less reliable and eventually diminish, resulting in widespread water shortages."
So New Scientist is not an independent reference; it refers back to the WGHG/ICSI 1999 report. It also quotes the chair of the WGHG, Syed Hasnain, and paraphrases of his statements became quotes in the WWF report.
At this point, all roads seem to lead back to the 1999 WGHG/ICSI report, which proves to be almost impossible to find. I checked with Prof. Cogley, who told me:
"The report has been dug out of the files of the then-Secretary of ICSI and posted at
www.cryosphericsciences.org/docs.html#ICSI1999. He is still looking for the minutes of the ICSI Bureau meeting. The report was received as Appendix 6. As far as my present understanding goes, the report has been available only to the members of the ICSI Bureau at the time (July 1999), and to anyone else to whom Hasnain may have sent it. You will see that it does not compare Himalayan with other rates of recession and does not mention a date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers."
Cogley is correct. There's absolutely nothing in the report that talks about Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035, nor is there a comparison between Himalayan glaciers and other glaciers. Did this information appear out of thin air? No, as we will see momentarily.
Recall that the IPCC quote referred to a table. The table lists the retreat of 8 Himalayan glaciers. Only one such retreat is as stated in the WWF report. Another retreat, recorded as 2840 m from 1845-1966, is listed as a rate of 134 m/yr, but the actual rate is 23 m/yr. Whoever did the calculation for the IPCC divided by 21 years instead of 121 years! The rest of the values are from other, unnamed sources.
Meanwhile, there's another quote that's relevant to our story. It comes from the India Environment Portal (IEP), one of several web sites set up by the Government of India to ensure that research news is broadly disseminated and available. This is from an article in 1999:
""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"."
There is a remarkable similarity between this article and the IPCC report. The first sentence in the IPCC report seems to me to be a simple paraphrase of the first two sentences from the IEP article, with quotation marks and references removed. The third and final sentence in the IPCC report extract is almost verbatim the second sentence in the second paragraph of the IEP extract above, with the word "likely" added and the quotation marks and attribution removed. The inartfulness of the transfer of verbiage from the IEP to the IPCC explains the first word ("Its") of the second IPCC sentence: there's no single noun to which "Its" can refer in the IPCC quote, but in the IEP quote, "Its" refers to "The glacier" (poor English, but singular) in the previous sentence. To me, this is like a fingerprint: I am convinced that the IPCC author paraphrased the IEP article and leaving off or altering the references.
But at least we've made some progress. Although the prediction of disappearance of glaciers from the Himalayas by 2035 seems to have no more authority than Dr. Hasnain's word for it, there's another reference (Kotlyakov) calling for massive loss of glaciers by 2035.
Cogley found the Kotlyakov report before I did. Here's what it says; brace yourself:
"The degradation of the extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be apparent in rising ocean level already by the year 2050, and there will be a drastic rise of the ocean thereafter caused by the deglaciation-derived runoff (see Table 11 ). This period will last from 200 to 300 years. 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 latitudes."
According to Kotlyakov, the loss of 80% of the extrapolar glaciation on the Earth's surface will be by 2350, not 2035. And even after 2350 there will still be some glaciers surviving in the Karakoram, the Himalayas, and in parts of Tibet.
It's clear from the rest of the paragraph that Kotlyakov means 2350, not 2035. The IEP article uses nearly a direct quote, but substitutes 2035 for 2350. The IPCC then paraphrases the IEP article, including massive glacial retreat by 2035 in the second sentence of the quote. It's not clear whether Dr. Hasnain himself misread the Kotlyakov report as 2035 instead of 2350 or whether he has some independent reason for thinking that glaciers will disappear from most of the Himalayas by 2035. If there is such a reason, I have not found it in the published literature, and neither the IPCC nor the other sources listed above have produced a traceable, correct citation for this assertion.
To recap, the available evidence indicates that the IPCC authors of this section relied upon a secondhand, unreferreed source which turned out to be unreliable, and failed to identify this source. As a result, the IPCC has predicted the likely loss of most or all of Himalaya's glaciers by 2035 with apparently no peer-reviewed scientific studies to justify such a prediction and at least one scientific study (Kotlyakov) saying that such a disappearance is too fast by a factor of ten!
This could have been a small, inconsequential error. The WG2 Chapter 10 authors did not highlight the prediction as a key finding in their executive summary, nor does it appear in the summary for policymakers. But such an astounding prediction could not help but attract attention. And it has long since become effectively common knowledge that the glaciers were going to vanish by 2035.
The Indian environment ministry released a report in November by Vijay Kumar Raina
moef.nic.in/downloads/public-information/MoEF%20Discussion%20Paper%20_him.pdf that concluded that Himalayan glaciers on the whole were retreating, but not at an alarming rate or any faster than glaciers on the rest of the globe. According to The Guardian, countryman Rajenda Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, was furious.
"Pachauri dismissed the report saying it was not "peer reviewed" and had few "scientific citations".
""With the greatest of respect this guy retired years ago and I find it totally baffling that he comes out and throws out everything that has been established years ago.""
Given the nature of the peer review and scientific citations in the IPCC report, we have here a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
A news article in Science (Nov. 13, subscription may be required) on the release of the report tries to summarize the reaction of scientists in the field. It says:
"Several Western experts who have conducted studies in the region agree with Raina's nuanced analysis—even if it clashes with IPCC's take on the Himalayas."
"The bottom line is that IPCC's Himalaya assessment got it "horribly wrong," asserts John "Jack" Shroder, a Himalayan glacier specialist at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. "They were too quick to jump to conclusions on too little data." IPCC also erred in its forecast of the impact of glacier melting on water supply, claims Donald Alford, a Montana-based hydrologist who recently completed a water study for the World Bank. "Our data indicate the Ganges results primarily from monsoon rainfall, and until the monsoon fails completely, there will be a Ganges river, very similar to the present river." Glacier melt contributes 3% to 4% of the Ganges's annual flow, says Kireet Kumar."
The Science article also included the following statement:
"Any suggestion that the retreat of Himalayan glaciers has slowed is "unscientific,". The Indian government has an "ostrichlike attitude in the face of impending apocalypse.""
Guess who made this statement?
Dr. Syed Hasnain.
Wow.
Where do we go now? Prof. Cogley told me:
"I would much prefer that we look ahead, in particular to ways of avoiding snafus like the 2035-2350 one in the future. Wherever the 2035 error originated, it took wing and has wasted an awful lot of time."
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