PrintOOOPS! Scientists goof on Himalayan glacier retreat
If anything, this story in The Times of London is good for a laugh - except that there's nothing funny about the people who wanted to use this information to steal trillions from the world's most productive nations.
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.Got that? The IPCC Report on which the science of global warming rests - a report being used to justify ruining industrial civilization - used an old story based on a brief telephone interview with a scientist nobody ever heard of, in a general interest science magazine geared for non-scientists (The New Scientist) to push the notion that the glacier's in the Himalaya's would be gone in 25 years.Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 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.
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.
It would be too easy to ascribe this idiocy to conspiracy. More likely, it is simply one more indication that the proponents of AGW don't care about the science and are promoting a political agenda.
