What’s remarkable about this article is just how unapologetic and brazen the UN is about making claims — and thus promoting expensive, uneconomic policies — that aren’t remotely based on science. This is precisely the pattern that was fortified from the ClimateGate e-mails.
[Wall Street Journal] An influential United Nations panel is facing growing criticism about its practices after acknowledging doubts about a 2007 statement that Himalayan glaciers were retreating faster than those anywhere else and would entirely disappear by 2035, if not sooner.Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, said Monday that the U.N. body was studying how the 2007 report “derived” the information about glacier retreat, according to a spokesman at the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi, where Dr. Pachauri is the director. Dr. Pachauri said glaciers were melting, but the 2035 date was in question, the spokesman said.
It was unlikely that these revelations about the IPCC report would overturn the scientific consensus on glacial retreat, but they raised questions for the IPCC about how the data on Himalayan glaciers were collected and reviewed.
“There’s a failure to review this data adequately by qualified experts,” said J. Graham Cogley, professor of geography at Trent University in Ontario, who is one of the first people to track down some of the apparent errors.
The IPCC report stated that the total area of Himalayan glaciers would likely shrink from 500,000 square kilometers to 100,000 square kilometers by 2035. The report cited a 2005 study by the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental advocacy group. That study cited a 1999 article in New Scientist magazine that quoted Indian glacier expert Syed Hasnain as saying Himalayan glaciers could disappear “within forty years.”
Dr. Hasnain presented a report on Himalayan glaciers in the summer of 1999, but it made no reference to 2035.
Earlier this month, Dr. Hasnain said in another New Scientist article that his previous assertions were based on “speculation,” rather than firm science.