The UN panel on climate change warning that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035 is wildly inaccurate, an academic says.

J Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University, says he believes the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.

He is astonished they “misread 2350 as 2035”. The authors deny the claims.

Leading glaciologists say the report has caused confusion and “a catalogue of errors in Himalayan glaciology”.

The Himalayas hold the planet’s largest body of ice outside the polar caps - an estimated 12,000 cubic kilometres of water.

They feed many of the world’s great rivers - the Ganges, the Indus, the Brahmaputra - on which hundreds of millions of people depend.

‘Catastrophic rate’

In its 2007 report, the Nobel Prize-winning Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said: “Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in 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 is not plausible that Himalayan glaciers are disappearing completely within the next few decades

Himalayan glaciers’ ‘mixed picture’

“Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres by the year 2035,” the report said.

It suggested three quarters of a billion people who depend on glacier melt for water supplies in Asia could be affected.

But Professor Cogley has found a 1996 document by a leading hydrologist, VM Kotlyakov, that mentions 2350 as the year by which there will be massive and precipitate melting of glaciers.

“The extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates - its total area will shrink from 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres by the year 2350,” Mr Kotlyakov’s report said.

Mr Cogley says it is astonishing that none of the 10 authors of the 2007 IPCC report could spot the error and “misread 2350 as 2035”.

“I do suggest that the glaciological community might consider advising the IPCC about ways to avoid such egregious errors as the 2035 versus 2350 confusion in the future,” says Mr Cogley.

He said the error might also have its origins in a 1999 news report on retreating glaciers in the New Scientist magazine.

The article quoted Syed I Hasnain, the then chairman of the International Commission for Snow and Ice’s (ICSI) Working group on Himalayan glaciology, as saying that most glaciers in the Himalayan region “will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming”.

Scientists say Himalayan glaciers need more study

When asked how this “error” could have happened, RK Pachauri, the Indian scientist who heads the IPCC, said: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

The IPCC relied on three documents to arrive at 2035 as the “outer year” for shrinkage of glaciers.

They are: a 2005 World Wide Fund for Nature report on glaciers; a 1996 Unesco document on hydrology; and a 1999 news report in New Scientist.

Incidentally, none of these documents have been reviewed by peer professionals, which is what the IPCC is mandated to be doing.

Murari Lal, a climate expert who was one of the leading authors of the 2007 IPCC report, denied it had its facts wrong about melting Himalayan glaciers.

But he admitted the report relied on non-peer reviewed - or ‘unpublished’ - documents when assessing the status of the glaciers.

‘Alarmist’

Recently India’s Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh released a study on Himalayan glaciers that suggested that they may be not melting as much due to global warming as it is widely feared.

He accused the IPCC of being “alarmist”.

India says the rate of retreat in many glaciers has decreased in recent years

Mr Pachauri dismissed the study as “voodoo science” and said the IPCC was a “sober body” whose work was verified by governments.

But in a joint statement some the world’s leading glaciologists who are also participants to the IPCC have said: “This catalogue of errors in Himalayan glaciology… has caused much confusion that could have been avoided had the norms of scientific publication, including peer review and concentration upon peer-reviewed work, been respected.”

Michael Zemp from the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich also said the IPCC statement on Himalayan glaciers had caused “some major confusion in the media”.

“Under strict consideration of the IPCC rules, it should actually not have been published as it is not based on a sound scientific reference.

“From a present state of knowledge it is not plausible that Himalayan glaciers are disappearing completely within the next few decades. I do not know of any scientific study that does support a complete vanishing of glaciers in the Himalayas within this century.”

Pallava Bagla is science editor for New Delhi Television (NDTV) and author of Destination Moon - India’s quest for Moon, Mars and Beyond.

Millions are suffering and thousands have died from flooding in Pakistan and China. An extraordinary heat wave in Russia sparked fires that caused dreadful pollution and wiped out swathes of the wheat crop. Are these weather-related disasters caused by global warming?

In its most recent report, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asserts that as the world becomes warmer, “flood magnitude and frequency are likely to increase in most regions.” This seems plausible. A warmer world is also likely to be a wetter world, as more water evaporates from the oceans into the atmosphere. But, although rainstorms put out some of the fires, Russia has a drought.

The UN panel also claims that droughts are more likely in a warmer world - and that they have become more frequent since the 1970s, partly because of reduced precipitation. In fact, the number of droughts reached a low point between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s. Evidence shows that there has been no statistically significant increase in droughts since the 1950s. Given that global temperatures appear to have risen considerably since then, it seems a stretch to blame the Russian drought on global warming.

Underpinning both the floods in Pakistan and China and the drought in Russia is a change in the usual pattern of the jet stream. Each hemisphere has a “polar” jet (seven to 12 kilometers above sea level) and a “subtropical” jet (at 10 to 16 kilometers). In the northern hemisphere, the polar jet pushes cooler air south and induces rain in mid-latitudes, while the subtropical jet pushes warm air north. But in mid-June, a kink appeared at the intersection, causing warm air to remain further north and east than normal and causing more cold air and rain to fall over northern Pakistan and China.

To make matters far worse, this kink in the jet stream was kept in place by a phenomenon called a “blocking event.” This kept the Russian heat wave going for nearly two months and massively exacerbated the precipitation in Pakistan and China.

Such blocking events are rare, and there is no evidence of links with global warming. However, an explanation has been proposed by Professor Mike Lockwood, an astrophysicist at the University of Reading in Britain, who shows in a recent paper that blocking events in the winter are related primarily to solar activity. (Although he cautiously said in an e-mail to me that he “cannot say much (yet) about summer conditions as most of our work to date has been on wintertime, which shows relatively strong solar effects in the Eurasian region").

So the culprit is quite possibly the sun, not human emissions of greenhouse gases.

Comparison of the last four solar cycles, note how cycle 23 was long and our recovery out of it into cycle 24 very slow. This is more like the cycles in the early 1900s and especially the early 1800s.

As for remedies, the current disasters demand a major humanitarian response. Worst affected is Pakistan, where an estimated 6 million people face cholera and other waterborne diseases unless they urgently get potable water. Pakistan’s government responded slowly, making immediate national and international philanthropy even more important.

But what of the longer term? Floods, droughts and other weather disasters have plagued mankind for all of history. But deaths from such natural disasters have fallen by more than 90 percent in the past 100 years despite dramatic population growth. Why? Because higher wealth and better technology enable people better to cope. This is a silver lining to this summer’s natural disasters. See post here.

Julian Morris is a visiting professor at the University of Buckingham and executive director of International Policy Network, London, an independent economic think tank. Richard Lourie will return to this spot in September.

Poor Al Gore. As if an im- pending divorce and allegations of sexual misconduct from an Oregon masseuse weren’t bad enough (he has since been cleared of wrongdoing), the apparent collapse of “cap-and-trade” legislation in the U.S. Senate has driven the former vice president to despair.

As reported by Steve Milloy on his blog Green Hell, Mr. Gore recently admitted to supporters in a conference call, “[T]his [cap-and-trade] battle has not been successful and is pretty much over for this year.” Mr. Gore blamed everyone and their monkey for the failure of Congress to pass comprehensive climate legislation, including his former colleagues: “The U.S. Senate has failed us,” he lamented, “the federal government has failed us.”

The fortunes of Mr. Gore’s global-warming crusade certainly are in decline: A recent Rasmussen poll found that just 34 percent of respondents “feel human activity is the main contributor” to global warming and that the percentage of those who consider global warming a “serious issue” has “trended down slightly since last November.”

Mr. Gore himself is to blame for at least some of the public backlash against global-warming orthodoxy: Using bad science to justify bad policy will inevitably rub people the wrong way. And Mr. Gore has not helped his cause by consistently expressing outrageous falsehoods ("the debate is over") and shamelessly trying to shield his assertions from legitimate criticism by claiming “settled science.” All the while, he has enriched himself and pushed a left-wing economic agenda.

Take, for example, the infamous “hockey stick” graph, a version of which was featured prominently in Mr. Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” The graph appeared to show global temperatures relatively flat for a millennium and then suddenly spiking upward in the late 20th century - proof, according to Mr. Gore and his acolytes, of man-made global warming caused by industrial carbon emissions.

Temperature records for the past century are based on instrumental data: thermometers, satellites, etc. For prior centuries, however, scientists rely on proxy data; in the case of the original hockey-stick graph, researchers relied on tree rings. But as Roy Spencer, former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, writes in “The Great Global Warming Blunder,” “the most recent tree-ring data do not even show the warming that occurred in the second half of the 20th-century, but appear to indicate a cooling instead.” Because tree rings do not show the recent warming that we know occurred, it follows that tree rings are not an adequate proxy by which we can accurately gauge past temperatures.

The unreliability of tree-ring data has long been known. Nevertheless, the hockey-stick graph was embraced enthusiastically by Mr. Gore and the global-warming crowd, for it conveniently dispensed with two significant climate events: the Medieval Warm Period (10th to 13th centuries) and the Little Ice Age (14th to 19th centuries). The former saw temperatures in the North Atlantic warm enough that vikings could settle and flourish in a lush Greenland, the latter temperatures so low that people routinely ice-skated on a frozen River Thames. Both of these climate events, for which there are masses of historical evidence, began before the Industrial Revolution and therefore are unattributable to man-made carbon emissions.

That’s why the global-warming crowd was so desperate to hide them: If people realize that temperature fluctuations occur naturally and cyclically, they are less likely to embrace the draconian, job-killing energy taxes favored by Mr. Gore and his ilk as punishment for their own carbon sins.

The hockey stick conveniently hid this natural temperature variation - for a while. Fortunately, thanks largely to the tireless work of independent researchers Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, the flaws in the statistical methodology used to create the various hockey-stick graphs have received widespread attention, and the once-iconic symbol of global warming has since been largely marginalized in the climate-change debate.

But not before it helped Al Gore to earn an Academy Award, a Nobel Peace Prize and an undeserved reputation as a scientific guru. As The Washington Post once noted of Mr. Gore’s academic credentials: “For all of Gore’s later fascination with science and technology, he often struggled academically in those subjects. The political champion of the natural world received [a] sophomore D in Natural Sciences 6 ... and then got a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118 his senior year.”

Imagine: We nearly let this former politician, who barely passed sophomore science at Harvard, persuade us to acquiesce to the monstrous statism of cap-and-trade, which would have resulted in higher energy and food prices and imposed yet another economic hardship on the poorest members of our society. All in the name of bad science.

Shame on him. And thank God he failed.

Matt Patterson is editor of Green Watch, a publication of the Capital Research Center.

The fossil record from oceans around New Zealand shows a sudden discharge of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere at the end of the last ice age, raising the possibility that a similar process may occur as a result of global warming, researchers say.

“We know that carbon dioxide cycles between the oceans and the atmosphere and that rising global temperatures cause the release of carbon dioxide from the deep ocean into the air,” Auckland University researcher Phil Shane said in a statement.

“But we found that the release of carbon dioxide from the Southern Ocean at the end of the last ice age was much faster than anticipated - on a scale of hundreds rather than thousands of years.”

The research, published in the latest issue of Nature, was conducted by scientists from New Zealand, the United States, and Spain. They examined microfossils in ocean sediment cores from the Bay of Plenty and the Chatham Rise, and Shane determined the chemical “fingerprint” of volcanic ash layers within the cores, providing crucial information about the age of the sediments.

Dating of two sediment cores from near New Zealand to be between 13,000 and 19,000 years old helped not only determine when the large CO2 release occurred but also the ocean pathway by which it escaped.

In recent years, other researchers have suggested some of that CO2 flowed back into the northern hemisphere rather than being entirely released into the atmosphere of the southern hemisphere.

But the new data - taken from cores of ocean sediments 600 meters to 1200 metres below the sea - suggest this “de-gassing” was regional, not global. If the effect was not global, then the North Pacific may be more important than previously thought in the comings and goings of ice ages.

And the research also has important implications for understanding what controls where and how CO2 comes out of the ocean, and how fast.

Factors involved include not only chemistry and ocean circulation but also the extent to which tiny phytoplankton and other photosynthesising organisms use CO2, then die and take carbon to the ocean floor.

During the last ice age, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere was lower because much of it was trapped in the bottom of the oceans. The circulation of oxygen through the deep Southern Ocean slowed considerably, but as the ice began to melt, the CO2 began to leak back into the atmosphere, eventually escaping quickly as warming intensified, and so thoroughly, that there was little trace of it in the NZ samples.

Today, the CO2 level in the atmosphere has been rising in the past 200 years, pushing up the levels in the ocean.

“Human activities are pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate and the build up of this important greenhouse gas is believed to contribute to global warming. It is also forcing much more carbon dioxide into the sea,” said Shane.

“If, as we have seen, the natural process of global warming at the end of the last glacial period caused the sudden release of extra carbon dioxide from the oceans into the air, there is reason to believe that a similar process might occur as a result of man-made global warming, further adding to the problem”.

Read story here.

As we have covered in previous essays, global warming alarmists insist that the southwestern United States is getting drier and will get substantially drier in the future due to the buildup of greenhouse gases. They bolster their claims by results from a relatively large number of articles in the professional scientific literature and countless comments in various UN IPCC reports. Throw in pictures of declining water levels at Lake Mead, some fountains in Las Vegas and golf courses in Phoenix, and just like magic, a scary scenario is produced.

As with virtually every other element of the climate change issue, the literature produces some surprises, and the drought in the Southwest claim runs up against some interesting realities. The latest article on this subject appears in a recent issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research and once again, the results are at odds with the popular perception of increased drought in the Southwest.

This recent work was produced by scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Delaware and had to survive the peer-review process for this respected journal of the American Geophysical Union. The final two sentences reveal where this is going as McCabe et al. conclude “El Nino events have been more frequent, and this has resulted in increased precipitation in the southwestern United States, particularly during the cool season. The “increased precipitation is associated with a decrease in the number of dry days and a decrease in dry event length.” What? More rain and fewer dry periods? We knew right away this would be featured in World Climate Report.

The authors focused on the Southwest “because (1) it has the highest consumptive use of water as a percentage of renewable supply in the United States and (2) dry event conditions in this region during the early 21st century have increased awareness of its vulnerability to water shortages.” There is no doubt that a lot of people have chosen to live in the Southwest and there is no doubt the desert climate of the region is prone to drought. In many respects, and depending on how one defines drought, the area is permanently in a state of drought (Phoenix has 7” of rain a year, Las Vegas averages about half of that amount).

McCabe et al. gathered data from 22 Weather Bureau-Army-Navy (WBAN) stations in the region “for water years (October through September) 1951 through 2006”. They explain that “During this period, 22 sites have nearly complete (99% complete) daily precipitation data. WBAN stations were selected because of the completeness of data record and the relative consistency of observational procedures.” They conducted their analysis for water years (October through September), cool seasons (October through March), and warm seasons (April through September).

They report that “trends in the fraction of dry days for water years, cool seasons, and warm seasons indicate that most trends are negative [i.e. towards more wet days, -eds.]. For water years, 18 sites exhibit negative trends in the fraction of dry days, and eight of these trends are statistically significant at a 95% confidence level. In contrast, only four sites indicate positive trends in the fraction of dry days for water years, and none of these trends is statistically significant at p = 0.05. For the cool season, 19 sites exhibit negative trends (12 are statistically significant at p = 0.05), and only 3 sites indicate positive trends (none are statistically significant).”

In this desert environment, cool season rain is far more important that rain in the summer. Rain falling in the hot summer season quickly evaporates and plays a relatively small role in water storage in the region. Nonetheless, the authors note that “For the warm season, 14 sites exhibit negative trends (seven are statistically significant), and 8 sites exhibit positive trends (six are statistically significant).”

The plot below (Figure 1) nicely reveals what has happened in the region. The number of dry days dropped over the entire study period but increased since 2000 (if you haven’t heard, the Southwest just experienced an unusually wet winter in 2009-2010). The authors varied the starting and ending dates in this time series of dry days and concluded “Examination of the counts of statistically significant trends in dry event length indicates small numbers of sites with significant positive trends for any period”.

Figure 1. Five year moving time series of the mean fraction of days with daily precipitation below 2.54 mm for water years (October through September), cool seasons (October through March), and warm seasons (April through September) (from McCabe et al., 2010). Enlarged here.

McCabe et al. make a number of interesting comments that do not support the claims that the Southwest is drying; they state “Our results are consistent with analyses of trends in discharge for sites in the southwestern United States, an increased frequency in El Niño events, and positive trends in precipitation in the southwestern United States.” They elaborate noting “Since the mid-1970s, the frequency of El Niño events has been higher than the long-term average. Precipitation in the southwestern United States generally is greater during El Nino years than during normal and La Nina years. Increased precipitation in the southwestern United States associated with the higher frequency of El Nino events since the mid-1970s should result in decreased drought length”.

The McCabe et al. team concludes “Little evidence of long-term positive trends in dry event length in the southwestern United States is apparent in the analysis of daily WBAN precipitation data. During the mid-1990s to late 1990s, drought conditions began in the southwestern United States and persisted in the 21st century. This drought has resulted in positive trends in dry event length for some sites in the southwestern United States. However, most of the statistically significant trends in the number of dry days and dry event length are negative trends for water years and cool seasons.” Furthermore, they conclude “Since the mid-1970s, El Nino events have been more frequent, and this has resulted in increased precipitation in the southwestern United States, particularly during the cool season. The increased precipitation is associated with a decrease in the number of dry days and a decrease in dry event length.”

As with so many other articles we feature, had this group found general trends toward drier conditions, you would have heard about it already. They clearly did not, and their results are counter to the claims that the region should be trending to increased drought. That’s why you come to World Climate Report for a different perspective on what is really found in the scientific literature!

Reference:

McCabe, G. J., D. R. Legates, and H. F. Lins. 2010. Variability and trends in dry day frequency and dry event length in the southwestern United States, Journal of Geophysical Research, 115, D07108, doi:10.1029/2009JD012866.

See post here.