When real scientists say they are uncertain about something because they know that nothing is matter – all is probability – they are called cooks and what they say is rejected by the real cooks – then when the scientists decide to be efficient by talking certainty rather then probability – the same real cooks call them charlatans. Is there any hope to a decent world led by decent government capable of saying that the uncertainty principle
becomes a must in dealing with the precautionary principle?

March 10, 2010   -  One Flew over…..The Sequel   {that must have been … the Cookoo’s Nest?}

http://jer-skepticscorner.blogspot.com/

UN to review errors made by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

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STOP THE PRESSES !

Sanity in the Main Stream Media

Editorial: Global warming challenge

FROM-OC Register

The possibility of suspending California’s Global Warming Solutions Act, a law unlikely to change temperatures but certain to wreak economic havoc, appears to have increased dramatically.

Two large Texas-based refineries have pledged as much as $2 million to pay for signature-gathering to place an initiative on the November ballot that would suspend the global warming law if passed by voters, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing Sacramento sources.

California refineries of the two companies, Valero Energy Corp. and Tesoro Corp., would be forced to slash greenhouse gas emissions. But the initiative would delay implementation until unemployment level drops to 5.5 percent for at least a year.

Unemployment is now at 12.4 percent.
The last thing California needs is an unnecessary law that drives up costs for businesses, prices for consumers and could send many of both fleeing the state.

The Times reported Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had asked businesses not to support the ballot measure. The initiative is sponsored by Assemblyman Dan Logue, R-Linda, Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Granite Bay, and the People’s Advocate, a Sacramento-based anti-tax group. They have until April 24 to gather 433,971 valid signatures.

It’s time the public vote on the increasingly questionable theory underlying California’s law. Leaked documents have shown climate scientists paid by government grants may have rigged data, suppressed conflicting information and blocked skeptical scientists from inspecting their studies and submitting alternate theories.

Global warming alarmism would penalize huge economic sectors by forcing the purchase of government permits to emit greenhouse gases, while imposing other costly conditions to switch to uneconomical, taxpayer-subsidized alternative fuels.

The science behind the global warming is highly speculative. Several disclosures in recent months have shown many catastrophic claims were based on slipshod documentation, not peer-reviewed studies. A recent disclosure from Sweden’s Goteborgs Universitet showed only 62 percent of sources cited by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were peer-reviewed in the its 2001 report.

Meanwhile, Dr. Phil Jones, head of Britain’s Climate Research Unit was forced to step down after thousands of leaked e-mails revealed he may have suppressed and altered data. He testified last week in the House of Commons that he withheld data of countries including Sweden because those nations’ prohibited release. But he was almost immediately rebutted by the nonprofit Stockholm Initiative “for a rational climate policy,” saying “All Swedish climate data are available in the public domain” and “that fact has been clearly explained to Dr. Jones.”

Claims of catastrophic global warming are based on computer models derived from increasingly questionable data by a relatively small cadre of scientists, who have profited for years from government and private grants to study the alleged threat. We say, let’s have a vote.

FROM-The Times

The United Nations is to announce an independent review of errors made by its climate change advisory body in an attempt to restore its credibility.

A team of the world’s leading scientists will investigate the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and ask why its supposedly rigorous procedures failed to detect at least three serious overstatements of the risk from global warming.

The review will be overseen by the InterAcademy Council, whose members are drawn from the world’s leading national science academies, including Britain’s Royal Society, the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The review will be led by Robbert Dijkgraaf, co-chairman of the Interacademy Council and president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He has been asked to investigate the internal processes of the IPCC and will not consider the overarching question of whether it was right to claim that human activities were very likely to be causing global warming.

The review, which will be announced in New York by Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General, and Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, is expected to recommend stricter checking of sources and much more careful wording to reflect the uncertainties in many areas of climate science.

The IPCC’s most glaring error was a claim that all Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. Most glaciologists believe it would take another 300 years for the glaciers to melt at the present rate.

It also claimed that global warming could cut rain-fed North African crop production by up to 50 per cent by 2020. A senior IPCC contributor has since admitted that there is no evidence to support this claim.

The Dutch Government has asked the IPCC to correct its claim that more than half the Netherlands is below sea level. The environment ministry said that only 26 per cent of the country was below sea level.

The allegations about climate scientists are believed to have contributed to a sharp rise in public scepticism about climate change. Last month an opinion poll found that the proportion of the population that believes climate change is an established fact and largely man-made has fallen from 41 per cent in November to 26 per cent.

The Met Office, which produces the global temperature record used by the IPCC in its reports, has proposed a separate review of its data after admitting that public confidence in its findings had been undermined.

The Met Office relies on analysis by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which is under investigation over allegations that its director manipulated raw data and tried to hide it from critics.
 http://jer-skepticscorner.blogspot.com/

————

We find in above the repetition of the figure 26 quite amusing. Actually we think that while at present perhaps indeed only 26% of the Netherlands is under sea level, but then, with sea level rise thanks to the melting of the ice at the poles, and in the mountain glaciers like in the Himalaya’s (what we call the three poles) – rest assured – half of the Netherlands will be under the water line. So what is your problem with that or with what the scientists said? By that time maybe 50% of the population will accept that this was an anthropogenic event – that is that they themselves caused it – and the only fault of the scientists was their shortage of words.

Arctic Melt To Cost Up To $24 Trillion By 2050: Report

Date: 08-Feb-10
Author: Timothy Gardner, Reuthers

WASHINGTON – Arctic ice melting could cost global agriculture, real estate and insurance anywhere from $2.4 trillion to $24 trillion by 2050 in damage from rising sea levels, floods and heat waves, according to a report released on Friday.

“Everybody around the world is going to bear these costs,” said Eban Goodstein, a resource economist at Bard College in New York state who co-authored the report, called “Arctic Treasure, Global Assets Melting Away.”

He said the report, reviewed by more than a dozen scientists and economists and funded by the Pew Environment Group, an arm of the Pew Charitable Trusts, provides a first attempt to monetize the cost of the loss of one of the world’s great weather makers.

“The Arctic is the planet’s air conditioner and it’s starting to break down,” he said.

The loss of Arctic Sea ice and snow cover is already costing the world about $61 billion to $371 billion annually from costs associated with heat waves, flooding and other factors, the report said.

The losses could grow as a warmer Arctic unlocks vast stores of methane in the permafrost. The gas has about 21 times the global warming impact of carbon dioxide.

Melting of Arctic sea ice is already triggering a feedback of more warming as dark water revealed by the receding ice absorbs more of the sun’s energy, he said. That could lead to more melting of glaciers on land and raise global sea levels.

While much of Europe and the United States has suffered heavy snowstorms and unusually low temperatures this winter, evidence has built that the Arctic is at risk from warming.

Greenhouse gases generated by tailpipes and smokestacks have pushed Arctic temperatures in the last decade to the highest levels in at least 2,000 years, reversing a natural cooling trend, an international team of researchers reported in the journal Science in September.

Arctic emissions of methane have jumped 30 percent in recent years, scientists said last month.

Goodstein’s study did not look at worst-case scenarios Arctic melting could have, such as warmer temperatures that trigger massive releases of crystallized methane formations in Arctic soils and ocean beds known as methane hydrates. It also did not look at sea ice erosion troubling people in the Arctic.

Shackleton’s Whiskey Found Buried Near South Pole.

Lauren Frayer
Contributor to aol.com
(Feb. 6, 2010) — It’s probably the most sought-after scotch in history – crates of whiskey buried in Antarctica by the famed explorer Ernest Shackleton a century ago. He abandoned them on a failed attempt to reach the South Pole in 1909, and they’ve been on ice – literally – ever since.

Researchers from New Zealand found the crates while restoring a hut Shackleton built and used during the expedition. He and his team were forced to cut short the trip and abandon supplies, including their booze, to sail away before winter ice trapped them there.

The New Zealand team first spotted two crates underneath the hut’s floorboards in 2006, but they were too deeply embedded in ice to be salvaged. Researchers returned to the site this past week, and finally extracted the crates after drilling into the ice around them. The surprise was that there were three more crates than expected – one more of whiskey and two of brandy.

The second trip was backed by the same Scottish company that distilled Shackleton’s whiskey, Mackinlay’s Rare Old Scotch. It could be the longest booze run in history. The Whyte and Mackay distillery hopes to replicate the whiskey, which hasn’t been made in a lifetime after the original recipe was lost.

“Given the original recipe no longer exists, this may open a door into history,” the company’s master blender, Richard Paterson, said in a release posted on the company’s Web site. He called the find “a gift from the heavens” for whiskey lovers.

“If the contents can be confirmed, safely extracted and analyzed, the original blend may be able to be replicated,” Paterson said.

Experts will try to extract the historic brew delicately. Some of the crates have cracked and ice has formed inside. Icebergs surrounding the crates smelled of whiskey, and there may have been leakage, according to Al Fastier, a restoration expert with the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust who made the find.

He told the BBC he heard the slosh of liquid inside the crates when they were moved, and is confident that much of the liquor is still inside.

Shackleton’s expedition ran short of supplies on a long trek to the South Pole that began in 1907. He had to turn back about 100 miles from the pole in 1909. The team had to move quickly to escape as winter ice began to form, so they were forced to abandon all but essential equipment and supplies – including their whiskey. No lives were lost.

A Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen, was first to reach the South Pole two years later, in 1911.

As for what the future holds for Shackleton’s whiskey, there are international treaties preventing the removal of artifacts from Antarctica, but Paterson wrote on his blog that he hopes to get his hands on at least a sample of the whiskey, if not a couple bottles.

“What you all want to know is: How will it taste?” Paterson wrote. “To which the answer is: Cold.”

The capital region is not accustomed to this much snow. The average annual snowfall for Washington is 15 inches. But the 2009-10 winter has been far from average. A major storm just before Christmas dumped up to 20 inches in some areas, and the city has seen smaller snow accumulations already twice this week.

The record snowfall for D.C. was 28 inches in 1922.This weekend alone will surpass that amount.

The snow was expected to become particularly heavy after nightfall and continue through Saturday. The Washington DC district’s director of transportation, Gabe Klein, said the snow could pile up at a rate of four inches an hour during parts of the storm, with winds gusting up to 25 miles an hour.

For district officials, the latest blizzard seemed a bit old hat. “We’re pretty much going to handle it in the same way we handled the last storm,” said William Howland Jr., director of D.C.’s Department of Public Works. In the spirit of the season, city press advisories referred to the storm as the “super snow bowl.”  Others dubbed it – “Snowmageddon.” We call it a potential tie-breaker in the Congressional Global Warming Wars. They will call it Washington Freezing and find in it an excuse for doing nothing on the Global Issue.

The storm also got the attention of the White House, whose current occupant, Barack Obama, famously dissed his adopted city’s response to a minor snowfall shortly after taking office last year. This time around, his tune had changed. As White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters, “Even a transplanted Hawaiian to Chicago has sufficient respect for a forecast of nearly two feet of snow.”

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Even as city officials were urging residents to stay off the streets, Washingtonians were making plans for mass revelry in the form of giant snowball fights. (A group snow battle during the December storm was marred when a police officer pulled out a gun after snowballs hit his Hummer.)

On Friday, a Facebook group promoted the “official DuPont Circle Snowball Fight” for Saturday afternoon and boasted that its membership had soared from 30 people on Thursday to more than 2,000 a day later.

Local bars and restaurants were offering Snow Day specials, with at least one establishment, Urbana, promoting a “baby, it’s cold outside beach party” theme.

Washington, Maryland and Virginia all declared snow emergencies Friday morning, and hundreds of flights were canceled at the region’s three major airports.  The lobbyists will be stuck in town this weekend. With snow soon to be sticking to the runways, a Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority spokesman said she expected the final flights to leave the area by 6 p.m., with the airports likely to be shuttered all day Saturday.

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By Nafeesa Syeed
AP
WASHINGTON (Feb. 6) — A blizzard battered the Mid-Atlantic region Saturday, with emergency crews struggling to keep pace with the heavy, wet snow that has piled up on roadways, toppled trees and left thousands without electricity.

The National Weather Service called the storm “extremely dangerous.”

Officials urged people to huddle at home and out of the way of emergency crews. Forecasters said the storm could be the biggest for the nation’s capital in modern history.

A record 2½ feet or more was predicted for Washington. As of early Saturday, 10 inches of snow was reported at the White House, while parts of Maryland and West Virginia were buried under more than 20 inches. Forecasters expected snowfall rates to increase, up to 2 inches per hour through Saturday morning.

Blizzard warnings were issued for the District of Columbia, Baltimore, parts of New Jersey and Delaware, and some areas west of the Chesapeake Bay.

“Things are fairly manageable, but trees are starting to come down,” said D.C. fire department spokesman Pete Piringer, whose agency responded to some of the falling trees. No injuries were reported.

President Barack Obama called the storm “Snowmageddon.”

Airlines canceled flights, churches called off weekend services and people wondered if they would be stuck at home for several days in a region ill-equipped to deal with so much snow.

“D.C. traditionally panics when it comes to snow. This time, it may be more justifiable than most times,” said Becky Shipp, who was power-walking in Arlington, Va., Friday. “I am trying to get a walk in before I am stuck with just the exercise machine in my condo.”

The region’s second snowstorm in less than two months brought heavy, wet snow and strong winds that forecasters warned could gust near 60 mph in some areas along the coast.

Hundreds of thousands of customers across the region had lost electricity and more outages were expected to be reported because of all the downed power lines. A hospital fire in D.C. sent about three dozen patients scurrying from their rooms to safety in a basement. The blaze started when a snow plow truck caught fire near the building.

Authorities blamed the storm for hundreds of accidents, including a deadly tractor-trailer wreck that killed a father and son who had stopped to help someone in Virginia. Some area hospitals asked people with four-wheel-drive vehicles to volunteer to pick up doctors and nurses to take them to work.

The country band Rascal Flatts postponed a concert Saturday in Ohio, but the Atlanta Thrashers-Washington Capitals NHL game went on as planned.

In Dover, Del., Shanita Foster lugged three gallons of water out of a Dollar General store.
“That’s all we need right now. We’ve got everything else,” said Foster, adding that she was ready with candles in case the power went out.

Shoppers jammed aisles and emptied stores of milk, bread, shovels, driveway salt and other supplies. Many scrambling for food and supplies were too late.
“Our shelves are bare,” said Food Lion front-end manager Darlene Baboo in Dover. “This is just unreal.”

Metro, the transit system the Washington area is heavily dependent upon, closed all but the underground rail service and suspended bus service.

Maryland’s public transportation also shut down Saturday, including Baltimore’s Metro. Maryland Transit Administration spokeswoman Jawauna Greene said the underground portion of the Metro could reopen later Saturday but it depended on the weather conditions.
“We have trees on the overhead wires, trees on train tracks. We can’t get anything out,” she said.

Amtrak also canceled several of its Northeast Corridor trains Saturday, and New Jersey’s transit authority expected to suspend bus service. As much as a foot of snow was reported in parts of that state.

Across the region, transportation officials deployed thousands of trucks and crews and had hundreds of thousands of tons of salt at the ready. Several states exhausted or expected to exhaust their snow removal budgets.

Maryland budgeted about $60 million, and had already spent about $50 million, Gov. Martin O’Malley said. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, who has been in office less than a month, declared his second snow emergency, authorizing state agencies to assist local governments. As of early Saturday, some parts of Virginia had already seen more than 18 inches of snow.

The snow comes less than two months after a Dec. 19 storm dumped more than 16 inches on Washington. Snowfalls of this magnitude – let alone two in one season – are rare in the area. According to the National Weather Service, Washington has gotten more than a foot of snow only 13 times since 1870.

The heaviest on record was 28 inches in January 1922. The biggest snowfall for the Washington-Baltimore area is believed to have been in 1772, before official records were kept, when as much as 3 feet fell, which George Washington and Thomas Jefferson penned in their diaries.

In Washington, tourists made the best of it Friday, spending their days in museums or venturing out to see the monuments before the snow got too heavy.

A group of 13 high school students from Cincinnati was stranded in D.C. when a student government conference they planned to attend was canceled – after they had already arrived. So they went sightseeing.

At the Smithsonian’s natural history museum, Caitlin Lavon, 18, and Hannah Koch, 17, took pictures of each other with the jaws of a great white shark in the Ocean Hall.
“Our parents are all freaking out, sending texts to be careful,” Koch said. “Being from Ohio, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that much snow at once.”

Associated Press writers Brett Zongker and Sarah Karush in Washington, Kathleen Miller in Falls Church, Va., David Dishneau in Chantilly, Va., Ben Nuckols in Hanover, Md., Randall Chase in Dover, Del., and Steve Szkotak in Richmond, Va., contributed to this report.

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Here in New York, I just came home from jogging on the street – there were more joggers out on a Saturday morning then I ever saw. The streets  are clear – the only white is that of salt some eager store owners or building – Supers sprinkled believing there will be snow. Indeed in between parked cars, in some streets, there is a little bit of white – so there was a dusting sometime earlier today. Will New York be spared this time? Was it all destined for Washington or we are still on line to get it later?

Plants sprout in Fuji permafrost thaw.

Kyodo News, Saturday, Jan. 23, 2010.
Researchers said Friday they have found at the summit of Mount Fuji grass and other seed plants that used to be unable to grow there, probably because the permafrost is ebbing due to rising temperatures.

The 3,776-meter summit could only grow moss about 20 years ago, but Takehiro Masuzawa, a Shizuoka University professor on plant physiological ecology, and his team recently found plants usually seen at an altitude of about 2,500 meters growing there.

Permafrost on Mount Fuji was found at an elevation of around 3,100 meters at the lowest level in 1976 and at around 3,200 meters in 1998, but the team found its edge had further receded and was even partially lost around the summit in 2009.

With low temperatures, strong winds and ultraviolet light as well as soil lacking water and nutrients, the mountaintop environment was thought to be too harsh to allow the growth of seed plants.

Masuzawa’s team will report its findings Sunday at the University of Tokyo.
 http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/nn20…

from:         Nira Gurung <ngurung@icimod.org>
reply-to   WorldEnvironmentalJournalists-owner at y…
to :              WorldEnvironmentalJournalists at yahoogr…
date:          Fri, Jan 22, 2010
subject:     Melting Himalayas – ICIMOD’s comments on a turbulent debate

Dear All,
Pleased to attach for your information and dissemination, ICIMOD’s comments on the ongoing debate on the rate of the melting of the Himalayan glaciers.

It is also shared below and available online at  http://www.icimod.org/?page=737

=====
Melting Himalayas – ICIMOD’s comments on a turbulent debate
Kathmandu, 21 January 2010
The debate on the rate of melting of the Himalayan glaciers has gained momentum in recent days. The debate has centred on the statement made in the IPCC AR4 Working Group II report that the Himalayan glaciers are retreating faster than in any other part of the world and at the present rate of retreat could disappear by the third decade of this millennium. This has culminated with the statement from the IPCC on 20 January 2010 retracting this one statement in AR4, but reiterating that the broader conclusion of the report is unaffected.

Many of the inferences regarding glacial melting are based on terminus fluctuation or changes in glacial area, neither of which provides precise information on ice mass or volume change. Measurements of glacial mass balance would provide direct and immediate evidence of glacier volume increase or decrease with annual resolution. But there are still no systematic measurements of glacial mass balance in the region although there are promising signs that this is changing. China is the only country in the region which has been conducting long-term mass balance studies of some glaciers and it has expressed the intention of extending these to more Himalayan glaciers in the near future. India has recently started to study several glaciers for regular mass balance measurements. Recognising the importance of mass-balance measurements, ICIMOD has been promoting mass balance measurements of benchmark glaciers in its member countries and has co-organised trainings to build capacity for this in the region.

ICIMOD has been drawing attention to the severe problems resulting from the lack of good scientific data and information for the Hindu Kush-Himalayan region, especially but not only on glaciers. This severely limits the ability to understand present changes or predict future impacts, a prerequisite for good decision-making thus the Centre has been promoting development of baseline information related to environmental processes and their changes. In early 2002, ICIMOD initiated a regional inventory of glaciers and glacial lakes, based on desk research and analysis of maps, aerial photographs, and satellite images. Since then, partner institutions have continued this work and developed inventories at national scales. ICIMOD is now focusing on assimilating existing information and national data and developing a regional database so that a regional monitoring system on the status of cryospheric elements like snow and glaciers can be put in place. Standardisation of methodologies
has been given due emphasis to facilitate integration of the database. At present, ICIMOD is conducting research on critical glacial lakes and is promoting the organisation of mass balance measurements in the region. Based on the analyses we have been doing, we can state that the majority of glaciers in the region are in a general condition of retreat, although with some regional differences; that small glaciers below 5000 m above sea level will probably disappear by the end of the century, whereas larger glaciers well above this level will still exist but be smaller; and that deglaciation could have serious impacts on the hydrological regime of the downstream river basins. Further, it is important to compare and summarise observations from a number of glaciers in different areas, of different size, and at different altitudes to draw clear scientifically justified conclusions about the changes that are occurring.

Although the lack of information and knowledge about the glacier melt processes in the Himalayas has been used to politicise the larger issues, the positive aspect of the debate has been the immense awareness created at various levels including politicians, decision makers, the media, and the public at large, which has led to some positive outcomes in recent months. In this context, the Indian Government has taken a decision to establish a specialised glacier research centre. Similarly, the concept of the Third Pole Environment initiated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences will have a positive impact on minimising the gaps in our basic understanding. ICIMOD is determined to contribute to developing better understanding of basic environmental processes, in particular climate change, glacial melting, and livelihoods impacts downstream, and highly commends these recent efforts made by our member countries.

***
Nira Gurung (Ms), Communications Officer
International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development
GPO Box 3226, Khumaltar, Lalitpur, Kathmandu, Nepal.
Tel +977-1-5003222 Direct Line 5003310 Ext 115 Fax +977-1-5003277  http://www.icimod.org

OK, there are disputes among Indian scientists and Indian officials who have connections to Indian oil industry. We knew this all the time and where not happy when under US President G.W. Bush the US pushed out under US business interests push, the scientific head of the IPCC and put in place the proxy Indians. But then, obviously, India is also not homogeneous – so we see internal Indian disputes.
YES – THE GLACIERS ARE MELTING AND NOBODY CAN PREDICT ACCURATELY THE YEAR OF THEIR FUTURE DEMISE – so what? The melting of these glaciers causes floods in the valleys – we know it because we see it. Yes, after they melt there will be draught – that is logic – it is implied in future shortage – that is clear. Those that love oil do not want to let go of it, and those that own refineries do not want to lose their investment – that is clear.
When lots of ice from above earth sites melts it will cause floods on coast line communities – that is clear. The melting of glaciers and the Antarctic ice will cause sea-level rise and floods – that can be sworn by – that is clear. Which island will disappear before 2013 or after – OK – that is not quite clear.
So what all this noise and only the UN can sound retreat – we do not. We also said that the relief of pressure on the tectonic plates because of the melting away of ice can cause earthquakes in areas where the plates meet – like the recent Tsunami belt over the earthquake belt shows. There are no scientific statements on this – only plain logic statements – so what? Yes we stopped short of our statement after the Haiti quakes and said – this one we do not exactly sense how it happened as we do not know of faults in that area. This is our lack of knowledge in this case that calls for help but it does not negate the prior statements. Science is not instantaneous – it requires further thinking and theories and proof if possible – not plain squabbles by industry-backed deniers and knee-jerk reactions by the UN. (our comments to the following news)

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SCIENCE, SPHERE, aol, January 21, 2010.

UN Climate Body Eats Crow Over Glacier Warning.

from Theunis Bates, a Contributor.

LONDON (Jan. 20) — It sounds like the plot of a Hollywood disaster movie: Central and Southern Asia are hit by biblical floods when the Himalayan glaciers suddenly melt. After that cataclysm, water no longer flows from the mountains, leaving rivers like the Mekong and Ganges dry and millions facing permanent drought. That was the picture painted by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report, which said there was a “very high” chance that these glaciers would disappear by 2035 if the world kept warming.

But the IPCC, the U.N. body charged with investigating climate change, has retracted that claim after it emerged that its predictions of a sudden melt weren’t based on peer-reviewed evidence, but instead on an article that appeared in the popular science magazine New Scientist in 1999.

Subel Bhandari, AFP / Getty Images

While the Khumbu Glacier near Mount Everest is shrinking, the United Nations admits it overstated the threat of a total glacial meltdown in the Himalayas.

Climate change skeptics have lapped up the scandal, which they’ve already dubbed “Glaciergate,” saying that it further erodes the credibility of climate science already damaged by last year’s Climategate e-mail scandal. Global warming denier Peter Foster, writing in Canada’s National Post, said the error showed how the “IPCC’s task has always been not objectively to examine science but to make the case for man-made climate change by any means available.”

But Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice chairman of the IPCC, said the mistake did not undermine the report’s key conclusions: that the warming climate is accelerating glacial melt and that this will affect the supply of water from the world’s major mountain ranges, “where more than one-sixth of the world population currently lives.”

“I don’t see how one mistake in a 3,000-page report can damage the credibility of the overall report,” van Ypersele told the BBC. “Some people will attempt to use it to damage the credibility of the IPCC; but if we can uncover it and explain it and change it, it should strengthen the IPCC’s credibility, showing that we are ready to learn from our mistakes.”

The argument over the IPCC’s melt date went public last November, when a paper written by Indian geologist Vijay Kumar Raina revealed that there was little consistency in the behavior of the Himalayan glaciers. Some were shrinking, he found, some expanding, and others were stable. If global warming were to blame, he asked, why weren’t they all following the same pattern? “A glacier … does not necessarily respond to the immediate climatic changes,” he wrote. “For if it be so then all glaciers within the same climatic zone should have been advancing or retreating at the same time.”

India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, endorsed the paper and accused the IPCC of being “alarmist” in its predictions. But IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri shot back that Raina’s findings were “voodoo science” and accused Ramesh of repeating the claims of “climate change deniers.”

Embarrassingly, it’s now the IPCC that stands accused of sloppy science, as a rigorous system of fact checks would have kept the controversial assertion out of the 2007 report. The claim first appeared in a 1999 interview between a New Scientist journalist and the Indian glaciologist Syed Hasnain, who speculated that the mountain range’s glaciers could vanish by 2035.

Environmental group the World Wildlife Fund then repeated Hasnain’s prediction in its 2005 report, “An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China.” As this was only was a campaigning paper, it had not undergone a thorough scientific review. But its lack of scientific rigor didn’t stop the IPCC using the WWF document as a source.

In chapter 10 of its 2007 report, the IPCC concluded: “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 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 square kilometers by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005).”

But many glaciologists believed those claims were overheated. As most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet thick, only a sudden, huge spike in global temperatures could cause them to disappear before 2035. “The reality, that the glaciers are wasting away, is bad enough,” Graham Cogley, a glaciologist at Canada’s University of Trent, who played a key role in exposing the flawed claim, told the United Kingdom’s Sunday Times. “But they are not wasting away at the rate suggested by this speculative remark and the IPCC report. The problem is that nobody who studied this material bothered chasing the trail back to the original point when the claim first arose.”

Indian glaciologist Murari Lal, the lead author of that section of the IPCC report, last week rejected claims that the U.N. group had made a serious error. “We relied rather heavily on gray [not peer-reviewed] literature, including the WWF report,” Lal told New Scientist. “The error, if any, lies with Dr Hasnain’s assertion and not with the IPCC authors.”

Unsurprisingly, Hasnain has refuted that attempt to pass the blame. “The magic number of 2035 has not [been] mentioned in any research papers written by me, as no peer-reviewed journal will accept speculative figures,” he said to New Scientist. “It is not proper for IPCC to include references from popular magazines or newspapers.”

That’s a tough but obvious lesson, and one the IPCC is unlikely to forget.

GLOBAL WARMING IGNITES BORDERS AS WELL

By Manuel Manonelles, BARCELONA, (IPS) Posted by Other News January 3, 2009.

Little by little, it is being confirmed that the melting of the polar ice caps, whether in Antarctica or the Arctic, is happening significantly faster than initially predicted. The consequences of this for peace, one of the main victims of climate change, are enormous.

Glaciers and areas of high-altitude mountains that were previously considered zones of perpetual snow are now melting. A paradigmatic case is that of the alpine border between Switzerland and Italy where during a recent routine verification, certain sections of ice or perennial snow that had been on the map since 1861 were found to be missing. In this case, the two countries have enjoyed long periods of peaceful coexistence and are approaching the problem in a logical and cordial fashion, forming a commission to find a technical solution.

However, the possible implications of cases like this in other geographical areas are very worrisome. The destabilising potential of a similar development on the India-Pakistan border would be enormous, particularly in the zone of Kashmir or the Siachen glacier, where more than 3000 soldiers of both countries have died since 1984. The same is true of the tense China-India border, or the deeply problematic border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which will grow increasingly porous with melting, contributing to a rise in destabilisation in what are already two of the most unstable countries on the earth.

Another major effect of global warming is the gradual opening of major global shipping lanes in areas that had previously been impassable because of ice. The Northeast Passage along the north of Russia, used recently for the first time in history, shortens travel between the ports of China, Japan, and Korea and Hamburg, Rotterdam, and South Hampton by 4,000 kilometres. With the Northwest Passage along northern Canada, travel between the China and the ports of the eastern United States is similarly shortened.

The opening of these new routes will completely change the dynamics of intercontinental trade and might render irrelevant places that until now were considered geostrategically essential, such as the Panama and the Suez Canal.

Add to this the draw of massive reserves of raw materials expected to be present in the Arctic, ever more accessible as the ice recedes, which is provoking a race for control of the area – including an arms race – and is stoking tensions particularly between Russia, Norway, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. The Russian news agency TASS has calculated oil reserves in the area at over 10 billion tonnes. Last year Canada approved an extraordinary 6.9 billion dollar arms bill to strengthen its military presence in its arctic zone, while Russia has resumed tactical flights of nuclear bombers in its polar region, triggering the protests of numerous countries.

This also explains, in part, the speed with which the European Union is processing the application for EU membership of bankrupt Iceland, which would place the body in the best possible position for future negotiations and territorial claims in the area with regard to future access to the “Arctic banquet”.

The melting of the ice caps is also the major cause of rising sea levels, which have other irreversible territorial, social, and economic consequences, such as the physical disappearance -partial or total- of certain small island states of the Pacific likely to occur within a few years -the Maldives, Samoa, Kiribati, among others. Obviously the implications are vast, including – in addition to the personal, environmental, cultural, and national trauma – the political and legal status of future states that have no territory. The principal components of the global infrastructure, from ports and refineries to airports and nuclear plants, are also seriously at risk, and will find themselves near or at or even below sea level.

It is important to note in this context that the majority of the global population lives in areas close to the sea, starting with megacities like Mumbai, London, New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires, and densely-populated areas like the Ganges delta in Bangladesh, where rising sea levels are already wreaking havoc in the form of water pollution and related effects. Recent studies indicate the possibility of some 200 million new environmental refugees in coming years -refugees who would only increase the already considerable humanitarian pressures and tensions in these areas and exacerbate existing or latent conflict.

The Global Humanitarian Fund issued a report this year that shows unequivocally that climate change today is responsible for some 300,000 deaths per year. Numbers for the medium and long-term are even higher. In this context, the urgency of fighting climate is a pre-condition for a peaceful future. Therefore, the international community has no other option, specially after the fiasco in Copenhagen, to spring into action as soon as possible. It is about climate, but also about peace and human lives.

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This and all “other news” issues edited by Roberto Savio can be found at http://www.other-net.info/index.php