Los glaciares del Himalaya no desparecerán en 2035 como profetizaba el IPCC
Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn't been verified
By David Rose
24th January 2010
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.
In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.
‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’
Chilling error: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrongly asserted that glaciers in the Himalayas would melt by 2035
Dr Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furore over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.
According to the IPCC’s statement of principles, its role is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis, scientific, technical and socio-economic information – IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy’.
The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF.
It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source.
The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121.
Last Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’.
Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’
In fact, the 2035 melting date seems to have been plucked from thin air.
Professor Graham Cogley, a glacier expert at Trent University in Canada, who began to raise doubts in scientific circles last year, said the claim multiplies the rate at which glaciers have been seen to melt by a factor of about 25.
‘My educated guess is that there will be somewhat less ice in 2035 than there is now,’ he said.
Forced to apologise: Chairman of the IPCC Raj Pachauri
‘But there is no way the glaciers will be close to disappearing. It doesn’t seem to me that exaggerating the problem’s seriousness is going to help solve it.’
One of the problems bedevilling Himalayan glacier research is a lack of reliable data. But an authoritative report published last November by the Indian government said: ‘Himalayan glaciers have not in any way exhibited, especially in recent years, an abnormal annual retreat.’
When this report was issued, Raj Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, denounced it as ‘voodoo science’.
Having been forced to apologise over the 2035 claim, Dr Pachauri blamed Dr Lal, saying his team had failed to apply IPCC procedures.
It was an accusation rebutted angrily by Dr Lal. ‘We as authors followed them to the letter,’ he said. ‘Had we received information that undermined the claim, we would have included it.’
However, an analysis of those 500-plus formal review comments, to be published tomorrow by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the new body founded by former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, suggests that when reviewers did raise issues that called the claim into question, Dr Lal and his colleagues simply ignored them.
For example, Hayley Fowler of Newcastle University, suggested that their draft did not mention that Himalayan glaciers in the Karakoram range are growing rapidly, citing a paper published in the influential journal Nature.
In their response, the IPCC authors said, bizarrely, that they were ‘unable to get hold of the suggested references’, but would ‘consider’ this in their final version. They failed to do so.
The Japanese government commented that the draft did not clarify what it meant by stating that the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing by 2035 was ‘very high’. ‘What is the confidence level?’ it asked.
The authors’ response said ‘appropriate revisions and editing made’. But the final version was identical to their draft.
Last week, Professor Georg Kaser, a glacier expert from Austria, who was lead author of a different chapter in the IPCC report, said when he became aware of the 2035 claim a few months before the report was published, he wrote to Dr Lal, urging him to withdraw it as patently untrue.
Dr Lal claimed he never received this letter. ‘He didn’t contact me or any of the other authors of the chapter,’ he said.
The damage to the IPCC’s reputation, already tarnished by last year’s ‘Warmergate’ leaked email scandal, is likely to be considerable.
Benny Peiser, the GWPF’s director, said the affair suggested the IPCC review process was ‘skewed by a bias towards alarmist assessments’.
Environmentalist Alton Byers said the panel’s credibility had been damaged. ‘They’ve done sloppy work,’ he said. ‘We need better research on the ground, not unreliable predictions derived from computer models.’
Last night, Dr Pachauri defended the IPCC, saying it was wrong to generalise based on a single mistake. ‘Our procedure is robust,’ he added.
Read more: [www.dailymail.co.uk]
En castellano sobre el tema:
Los glaciares del Himalaya no desparecerán en 2035 como profetizaba el IPCC (Actl.)
Escrito por: Luis I. Gómez el 19 Jan 2010 Actualización 19 enero 2010:
La World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) admite su error al publicar en 2005 que los glaciares del Himalaya desaparecerían en 2035!!
Syed Iqbal Husnain’s report — the basis of the WWF claim — was published in 1999 when he was with Jawaharlal Nehru University, Pachauri said on Monday. Husnain is now a distinguished fellow with The Energy and Resources Institute, a body headed by the IPCC chief.
The issue was being reviewed and a statement would be issued this week, he said. The claim would be deleted from the IPCC report, a UN official told HT on condition of anonymity. The IPCC’s claim was based on a WWF study, Retreating Glaciers, in India, China and Nepal.
Ahora sigan leyendo …
Cuando los encargados de redactar el 4. informe del IPCC llegaron al capítulo de los glaciares, se dieron cuenta de que apenas si tenían informaciones sobre lo que estaba ocurriendo en el Himalaya. Ni cortos ni perezosos se van al directorio de su secretaria y encuentran el número de teléfono de un científico hindú llamado Syed Hasnain, docente e investigador de la Jawaharlal Nehru University de la ciudad de Delhi. El hombre, seguramente anonadado ante la importancia de la llamada que estaba recibiendo, comentó que muy probablemente, y de seguir el ritmo de calentamiento, los glaciares del Himalaya desaparecerían en 2035. Contentísimos, los redactores del informe pasaron a plasmar el apocalipsis himalayo en su escrito. El Profesor Murari Lal, encargado de revisar esa parte del informe, no vio nada digno de matización y dió su visto bueno a la “predicción”.
Resultado: el mundo alarmadísimo, la prensa con las manos en la cabeza y los políticos dispuestos al atraco: hay que salvar el planeta!
Pues no. Los glaciares del Himalaya no desaparecrán en 2035. Syed Hasnain ha reconocido hace unos días que basó su información telefónica en un artículo que había leído en 1999 en la revista de divulgación New Scientist (que es como si al Ministro de Medioambiente español le da por citar en sus informes una “noticia” de la sección de ciencia de EL Mundo, vamos) Lo había leído en 1999! A preguntas de los periodistas Hasnain reconoce que predecir la desaparición de los glaciares del Himalaya es pura especulación, no fundamentada en ningún estudio de nigún tipo!
Ahora, el Profesor Murari Lal no duda en afirmar que, de ser cierto lo que afirma Hasnain, la mención a la desaparicíon de los glaciares himalayos debe ser retirada de cualquier publicación del IPCC:
“If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, than I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments”.
El bueno dce Pachauri (ya saben, el jefe del IPCC) está ahora en aprieto (uno más), ya que hace apenas 5 semanas declaraba que el gobierno hindú pecaba de arrogancia al negar que el Calentamiento Global tuviese nada que ver con las fluctuaciones de los glaciares himalayos. Estamos esperando a ver qué dice ahora.
La discusión está servida … Ya saben que yo soy de la opinión de que los glaciares crecen y decrecen desde que exisiten, y que la tendencia general mientras nos hallemos en período interglacial, es que decrezcan. Lean los ultimos trabajos sobre la influencia del hollín precisamente en el Himalaya (enlace más abajo) y verán que no es temperatura todo lo que reluce.
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[[i]Ganador de un Premio Nobel reconoce fraude en el trabajo por el que obtuvo el premio
[Escrito por: Luis I. Gómez el 24 Jan 2010 |
El Dr. Murari Lal, ganador junto con Al Gore y todos los demás colaboradores del IPCC de un Premio Nobel de la Paz, acaba de reconocer en una entrevista para el Daly Mail que, con el fin de “animar a los políticos a hacer algo”, introdujo datos sin contrastar en su capítulo del informe IPCC:
“We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was grey literature [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors”
“It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action”.
Esto no es un científico, es un activista!
El movimiento de camuflaje y rectificación en las filas calentólogas a cuenta de la mentira sobre los glaciares himalayos está siendo espectacular. Si acuden a “Watts up with that“, el magnífico blog de Anthony Watts, verán cómo la web de la NASA en su sección de alarmismo, ha cambiado sus contenidos … sin dar ninguna explicación! Menos mal que existe el google-cache. Anthony invita a sus lectores a buscar y citar otras webs que “copien” el intento de ocultación de la NASA. Yo les animo a ustedes a que lo hagan también y nos lo cuenten. Incluso en este blog, cuando nos hemos equivocado, hemos hecho siempre referencia al error cometido. Jamás se ha borrado nada sin dar explicaciones. Y eso que este no es un blog serio :P
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link al artículo:
[www.desdeelexilio.com]