Claims by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the Himalayan glaciers are threatened appear to be based on little more than a short telephone interview for a news report over ten years ago. According to an article in the TimesOnline, the world has been “misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown.
Last week the IPCC refused to comment so it has yet to explain how someone who admits to little expertise on glaciers was overseeing such a report. Perhaps its one consolation is that the blunder was spotted by climate scientists who quickly made it public.
The lead role in that process was played by Graham Cogley, a geographer from Trent University in Ontario, Canada, who had long been unhappy with the IPCC’s finding.
Cogley said: "The reality, that the glaciers are wasting away, is bad enough. 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. It is ultimately a trail that leads back to a magazine article and that is not the sort of thing you want to end up in an IPCC report.”
For the rest of the story, read the article in the TimesOnline.
