Another IPCC claim evaporates

Yet another piece of research that has been endorsed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and has underpinned man-made global warming theory has been revealed to be a work of fiction which has misled the world. The Sunday Times reported yesterday that its prediction that the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035 will probably be retracted. This is because it has been revealed that it was based on nothing more than a news story in the New Scientist eight years previously – and that report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist, who has admitted that the claim was ‘speculation’ and was not supported by any formal research. Despite the fact that this claim surfaced in a campaigning report rather than an academic paper and so was not subjected to any formal scientific review, the Sunday Times notes that it rapidly became a key source for the IPCC which when it incorporated the claim went even further.

The report read: ‘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.’

However, glaciologists find such figures inherently ludicrous, pointing out that most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035 unless there was a huge global temperature rise. The maximum rate of decline in thickness seen in glaciers at the moment is 2-3 feet a year and most are far lower.
Ludicrous it may have been, but then AGW zealots promulgate ludicrous claims by the bucketload and still they are believed. The story goes on:

Some scientists have questioned how the IPCC could have allowed such a mistake into print.
Sigh. The IPCC’s entire AGW theory rests upon such ‘mistakes’. This revelation follows hard on the heels of the scandal at East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit, which was revealed to have been manipulating temperature data which was part of the IPCC’s core ‘research’, and freezing out scientists who challenged these falsehoods; previous revelations of the manipulation of tree ring proxy temperature data; previous to that, the revelation that the ‘hockey stick’ graph upon which the IPPCC relied and which apparently showed global temperatures suddenly shooting upwards in the industrial age was based on , er, totally flawed mathematics and the omission of several centuries of global temperature history; not to mention a number of scientists used by the IPCC as expert reviewers who have blown the whistle on research which the IPCC has distorted or suppressed. Read more.