The Case of the non-Disappearing Glaciers

The IPCC's 2007 report said that the Himalayan glaciers would completely melt by 2035. It even gave this a high degree of confidence (90%). Recently, they had to backtrack on this claim. What happened should cast doubt on the IPCC as a whole.

The Himalaya claim originally came from an article in New Scientist which is not peer reviewed. It quoted an Indian scientist named Jawaharlal Nehru who had mentioned that the glaciers would melt in 30 years in a phone interview. It turns out that Nehru had not done any actual studies to back this claim. He was exaggerating to make a point. What is more, he was only talking about a small part of the Himalayan glaciers.

It's bad enough that this claim made its way into an IPCC report but the route that it took is the real scandal. The author of the offending chapter took his figures from a campaign report put out by the World Wildlife Fund. It turns out that the person writing the chapter did not have any expertise on glaciers and, rather than research peer-reviewed literature, he turned to a summary produced by an advocacy group. The WWF obviously cherry-picked their data since they were relying on publications that were not peer-reviewed.

Despite the sloppy science behind the claim, the IPCC still gave it a 90% confidence rating. When the utter impossibility of the claim was brought up, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC dismissed the challenges as "voodoo science".

For years we have been told that the IPCC was made up of disinterested scientists who were the best experts on climate. If anyone dared express skepticism, he was branded a Climate Change Denier. This recent article dismisses TV skeptical meteorologists as deniers who get their information from right-wing talk shows instead of from real scientists.

This whole episode shows that the IPCC reports are written by people who are no better informed and who quote left-wing sources. Granted this is one small example but there is no guarantee that the rest of the IPCC report represents any better science. Former members of the IPCC have complained for years that the reports are written by ideologues who reject valid challenges to their interpretation of the data.

UPDATE: It gets worse. The scientist in question knew that he was including unverified data but stuck it in anyway in order to apply political pressure.

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

This is exactly what the skeptics have been saying since the last IPCC report came out - that it included exaggerations and flawed science for political reasons.