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IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri at a press conference in New Delhi on Jan. 23. Pachauri told reporters that a doomsday prediction about the fate of Himalayan glaciers was 'a regrettable error.' (Manan Vatsyayana/AFP/Getty Images)
A claim that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 as a result of global warming has been retracted by the U.N. body that made it after it was found to have no scientific basis.
In what has been dubbed Glaciergate, Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said he regrets “poorly substantiated estimates” claiming the Himalayan glaciers were likely to disappear by 2035 if not sooner.
“It was a human error. We will do everything to see that such mistakes are not repeated,” Pachauri told reporters in New Delhi on Saturday.
The melting glaciers warning was a central part of the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report—the same report that helped win the IPCC its 2007 Nobel Peace Prize along with global warming guru Al Gore. The panel provides scientific advice to governments for climate change policy.
The blunder was discovered by Canadian Graham Cogley, a geographer at Trent University in Ontario, who traced the IPCC claim to an article published in the New Scientist magazine in 1999.
According to London’s Sunday Times, the New Scientist information came from a short telephone interview with Indian scientist Syed Hasnain. Hasnain said his assertion was “speculation” and had not been peer-reviewed—a point noted in the article.
Still, the unresearched claim wound up in 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,” Cogley told the Times.
The IPCC quoted a 2005 campaigning report from the environment group World Wildlife Fund (WWF) as its source for the claim, which had in turn sourced Hasnain’s comments to the New Scientist and a New Delhi magazine called Down To Earth. WWF has said that it regretted “any confusion caused” and would make appropriate changes to its report.
NOT THREATENED? This photograph taken on Dec. 4, 2009, shows the Khumbu Glacier, one of the longest in the world, in the Everest-Khumbu region some 87 miles northeast of Kathmandu. The IPCC has withdrawn claims the Himalayan glaciers are rapidly melting. (Prakash Mathema/AFP/Getty Images)
Claim ‘Alarmist’
Several glaciologists have disputed the IPCC’s claim, pointing out that most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet thick and that it would take a huge rise in temperature to melt them by 2035. According to the Guardian newspaper, the claim was questioned by the Japanese government before publication of the IPCC report, as well as by other scientists.
India's environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, called the claim “alarmist.”
"There is no conclusive scientific evidence to link global warming with what is happening in the Himalayan glaciers,” Ramesh told the Guardian newspaper, adding that he was prepared to take on “the doomsday scenarios of Al Gore and the IPCC.”
Pachauri then attacked Ramesh, saying he was “extremely arrogant” and relied on “voodoo science” that is not peer-reviewed.
But India’s environment ministry had done its own study, which found that while many Himalayan glaciers are receding, they are not “retreating abnormally” and that the trend is not consistent across the entire mountain chain.
“The issue of glacial retreat is being sensationalized by a few individuals,” the report’s author, leading geologist Vijay Kumar Raina, told the Hindustan Times.