Monday, January 18, 2010

First there was Climategate, now Glaciergate & Watergate II!

The wheels continue to fall off the climate change bangwagon.

From today's The Australian:

In its 2007 report, the IPCC concluded: "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the earth keeps warming at the current rate."

It was a sweeping, bold and alarmist prediction by the IPCC, and one that raised eyebrows among many of the small group of experts who study the behaviour of the world's glaciers.

But the IPCC defended its glacier claims vigorously, with IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri recently describing those who cast doubt upon them as practitioners of "voodoo science".

Yet today it is the powerful IPCC that stands accused of practising voodoo science in relation to its sweeping claims about the melting of Himalayan glaciers following revelations its apocalyptic predictions were based on little more than "speculation".

At face value, the disclosures by Britain's The Sunday Times (reprinted in The Australian yesterday) amount to one of the most serious failings yet seen in climate research.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/climate-science-on-thin-ice/story-e6frg6z6-1225820985361

Later in the same article:

"An Australian glacier expert, Cliff Ollier of the University of Western Australia, accuses the IPCC of being "deliberately alarmist" with its predictions about melting glaciers because he says the organisation has a vested interest in global warming. "Glaciers started to retreat in 1895 when there was no correlation to global warming," Ollier says. "Now we are seeing a general retreat on glaciers because we are coming out of an ice age, but there is nothing alarming about it. These retreats are not caused only by temperatures.""

Do read the whole article. As it turns out, despite what IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri says about them having "a very clear idea of what is happening" in the Himalayas, you'll find out just how little we actually know about what is happening there.

Elsewhere:

The IPCC: Hiding the Decline in the Future Global Population at Risk of Water Shortage

More Insidious than the Himalayan error
Guest post by: Indur M. Goklany
This concerns how the IPCC has cherry-picked only the nagative data when it comes to forecasting the possible effect of climate change on future water supplies.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous

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