Glacial guesswork.

I saw this the other day on WUWT and haven't sussed out how to fit it in to the warble gloaming dates for my diary.

Told ya so... IPCC to retract claim on Himalayan Glacier Melt.

This is something WUWT have been on for a while, the long and short of it being that the IPCC, and later by extension various other warble gloaming doom mongers, claimed in the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) that Himalayan glaciers are at risk of melting away by 2035. The trouble is that that estimate seems to be based on little more than a bit of guesswork and some sums on the back of someone's organic fag packet. The head of the IPCC, the infamously independent er, heavily networked Rajendra Pachauri was having none of it of course - he even called an Indian government minister who'd expressed doubts 'arrogant' - but as WUWT says that now looks more applicable to Pachauri himself.

It’s now taken almost a month for the Times to catch up to this issue, and now it has made MSM news...

The Times, January 17, 2010


World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown


Jonathan Leake and Chris Hastings


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.


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.

More evidence of how much bullshit there is, but do I add it to the list as glaciers in the Himalayas not to melt by 2035 or what?