The Himalayan glaciers, as pictured here by an astronaut aboard the ISS, are safer than reported in the IPCC's 2007 report.
Credit: NASA
NEW DELHI: The head of the U.N.'s climate science panel confirmed the doomsday prediction of Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035 as an error but said he would not resign over the blunder.
Addressing a press conference in New Delhi, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said the mistake arose from "established procedures not being diligently followed".
"I am not resigning from my post. There has been an error but we will ensure greater consistency in every [future] report," he said.
IPCC procedures not followed
Pachauri was referring to a forecast that featured in a 2007 report on global warming that the probability of glaciers in the Himalayas "disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high".
The IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report was a 938-page opus whose warning that climate change was on the march spurred politicians around the world to vow action.
The panel has apologised for "the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures."
Pachauri said the report's general conclusions that Himalayan glaciers were retreating due to global warming were "robust, appropriate, and entirely consistent with the underlying science".
Accidental inversion of 2350 to 2035
"The world is on the path of unsustainable development and we will have to change our lifestyle," he told reporters. He said the forecast that the glaciers could disappear by 2035 may have "genuinely alarmed" some people.
But he said there had been a benefit in that it created a "heightened awareness about the real threat to Himalayan glaciers."
The glacier error came to light after four prominent glaciologists and hydrologists wrote a letter to the prestigious U.S. journal Science. They said the paragraph's mistakes stemmed from a report by the conservation group WWF.
WWF had picked up a news report based on an unpublished study, compounded by the accidental inversion of a date - 2035 instead of 2350 - in a Russian paper published in 1996.
"These errors could have been avoided had the norms of scientific publication, including peer review and concentration upon peer-reviewed work, been respected," according to the letter to Science.
Pachauri defended the panel's overall work, a position shared by other scientists, who say the core conclusions about climate change are incontrovertible. He added he would finish the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Reports.
The reports, due out in 2013 and 2014, will focus on sea level changes, the influence of periodic climate patterns such as the monsoon season and El Nino, and forge a more precise picture of the regional effects of climate change.
"Rational people continue to repose faith in IPCC and are seeing the larger picture," Pachauri said.
Yeah! An Error! Right!
Pachauri et al at the IPCC should be prosecuted for pulling off a global scam.
1. The Himalayan glacier forecast was a "regrettable error".
2. The so-called peer-reviewed literature cited in the IPCC reports came from World Wildlife Foundation campaign publications.
3. Notations regarding shrinking glaciers around the world based on a mountain climbing magazine article and a student dissertation that didn't even conclude that global warming was the culprit.
4. Their forecasts for the demise of the Amazon rainforest turned out to be totally false.
Sorry, Mr. DaSilva! These aren't errors -- regrettable or otherwise. We've been lied to to further a global governance agenda.
Sorry if I seem "boorish", Mr. DaSilva. But I just don't trust so-called elites.
glaciers - IPCC error
In the Natural History Museum in Vienna, Austria, there is a series of photographs of European glaciers, taken around 1900, and equivalent photos, taken from exactly the same points, at exactly the same angle, in 2000. The difference is just STUNNING. And those are not forecasts or complex, controversial computer models but naked facts - climate change staring you in the eyes.