Following Climategate — the leaking of thousands of emails and computer files that show many of the world’s leading climate scientists fudging the results of their global warming research and contriving to keep skeptics from being published in academic journals which I discussed December 3rd in “Global Warming? Not So Fast” – comes even more bad news for global warming advocates.
One of the prominent claims of impending environmental disaster in the United Nations’ 2007 report was the prediction that all of the 15,000 glaciers in the Himalayas could melt away by the year 2035. However, now it seems that the Times of London has learned that this claim was not based on scientific enquiry at all, but instead on speculation. Instead, this piece of the overwhelming scientific consensus was taken from a 1999 issue of The New Scientist magazine where an Indian climatologist named Syed Hasnain told reporter Fred Pearce that is was his “speculation” that the Himalayan glaciers would “vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming.” Dr Hasnain cautioned at the time that the data that resulted in his speculation had neither been published nor peer reviewed, which was noted in the article by Mr Pearce.
The Hasnain interview remained largely dormant until 2005 when the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) cited it in a report it prepared as a lobbying and fundraising tool. The WWF report was not peer-reviewed either (nor need it have been since it was produced by a special interest group to advance its cause). Nonetheless, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the UN’s official climate research branch — picked up on the WWF’s untested claim and, apparently without doing any further checking of its own, stated in its 2007 report that “glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and … the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high,” above 90%.
This is the report that helped secure the IPCC its Nobel Prize. It is the report that stated categorically that man-made emissions were the main cause of global warming and climate change.
Indian government scientists helping to assemble the IPCC’s 2007 report warned the Himalayan glacier claim was shaky. They told the UN their own research showed comparatively little glacial retreat. But the IPCC ignored them.
This is but one of several “problems” the IPCC is now dealing with in the defense of the debate being over concerning the “science” in the whole global warming discussion.
In November of 2009, the IPCC released a statement which was printed on the New York Times website which included the line which read “IPCC relies entirely on peer reviewed literature in carrying out its assessment…” Eight days later, if you had checked the IPCC website, you would find the exact same statement which was published by the Times with one difference. The IPCC now says, “IPCC relies mainly on peer reviewed literature in carrying out its assessment…” Changing the word entirely to mainly completely negates Al Gore’s statement that the debate is over.
Now it comes to light that the IPCC claims about melting ice in the Alps, the Andes, and in Africa come from an article in Climbing Magazine, not peer reviewed scientific literature and their other source was a student dissertation written by a climate change activist who was studying for a degree in geography!
Further revealed was that the claim the Global Warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise.
In a recent interview with the BBC, Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia brings some startling revelations. In the interview it was revealed:
– The late 20th century warming rate is not unique…that it actually happened twice before in the past 150 years (between 1860-1880 and again between 1910-1940 the temperatures went up and then back down).
– There has been no significant warming since 1995
– There has actually been a slight cooling since 2002
– There is no real consensus with regard to Mann’s Hockey Stick Chart which was used in Al Gore’s movie showing consensus
– He admits to asking colleagues to delete all the emails concerning the IPCC climate report
– And most telling, Jones admits there is no consensus among scientists.
So, what is going on here? Why is Congress pressing ahead with Cap and Trade? And why are papers in the UK and Canada the only ones reporting on it?