The Khumbu Glacier, one of the longest glaciers in the world, in the Everest-Khumbu region about 140 km northeast of Kathmandu. The Himalayan glaciers provide water for more than a billion people in Asia, but experts are divided over their future.
Credit: AFP
PARIS: The U.N.'s panel of climate scientists said they will investigate claims its own doomsday prediction for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is mistaken.
In 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that glaciers in the Himalayas were receding faster than in any other part of the world and could "disappear altogether by 2035 if not sooner".
At the weekend, Britain's Sunday Times newspaper reported that this reference came from the green campaign group WWF, which in turn took it from a magazine interview given by an Indian glaciologist in 1999.
'Climategate' embarrassment continues
There is no evidence that the claim was published in a peer-reviewed journal, a cornerstone of scientific credibility, it said.
"We are looking into the issue of the Himalayan glaciers, and will take a position on it in the next two or three days," the IPCC's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri said.
The Sunday Times reported that the IPCC was likely to retract the figure, which would be a humiliation and a further boost for climate sceptics after a scandal last month dubbed 'climategate'.
Emails from scientists at Britain's University of East Anglia, a top centre for climate research, were leaked and seized on by sceptics last month as evidence that experts twisted data in order to dramatise global warming.
Some of the thousands of messages expressed frustration at the scientists' inability to explain what they described as a temporary slowdown in warming.
"Not just a little bit wrong"
A leading glaciologist who contributed to the Fourth Assessment Report described the mistake as huge and said he had notified his colleagues of it in late 2006, months before publication.
Loss of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 would take two or three times the highest expected rate of global warming, said Georg Kaser of the Geography Institute at Austria's University of Innsbruck.
"This number is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of magnitude. It is as wrong as can be wrong.
"To get this outcome, you would have to increase the ablation [ice loss] by 20 fold. You would have to raise temperatures by at least 12 degrees [Celsius]."
"It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing ... I pointed it out."
Asked why his warning had not been heeded, Kaser pointed to "a kind of amateurism" among experts from the region who were in charge of the chapter on climate impacts, where the reference appeared.
"They might have been good hydrologists or botanists, but they were without any knowledge in glaciology," he said.
The Fourth Assessment Report said that the evidence for global warming was now "unequivocal", that the chief source for it was man-made and that there were already signs of climate change, of which glacial melt was one.
The massive publication had the effect of a political thunderclap, triggering promises to curb greenhouse gases that had stoked the problem.
Kaser said the core evidence of the Fourth Assessment Report remained incontrovertible.
Fears of more "IPCC bashing"
"I am careful in saying this, because immediately people will again engage in IPCC bashing, which would be wrong," he said.
But he acknowledged that the process of peer review, scrutiny and challenge, which underpin the IPCC's reputation had "entirely failed" when it came specifically to the 2035 figure.
The 2035 reference appeared in the second volume of the Fourth Assessment Report, a tome published in April 2007 that focussed on the impacts of climate change, especially on human communities.
Billions rely on future of Himalayan glaciers
Part of the problem, said Kaser, was "everyone was focussed" on the first volume, published in February 2007, which detailed the physical science for climate change.
Work on this volume was "much more attractive to the community" of glaciologists, and they had failed to pick up on the mistake that appeared in the second, he said.
The question of glacial melt is a vital one for South Asia, as it touches on flooding or water stress with the potential to affect hundreds of millions of lives.
Indian scientists are split on how fast Himalayan glaciers are receding and whether or not climate change is responsible for this. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has repeatedly challenged the IPCC's claims, saying there is no "conclusive scientific evidence" linking global warming to the melting of glaciers.
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