Glaciers On Fire


How did “experts” arrive at a powerful United Nations estimate that glaciers were melting at a rapid pace? It’s an important question because glacier melting has been a key claim underlining efforts to regulate carbon emissions via the theory of manmade global warming.

Here’s how:

But it now appears that the estimate about Himalayan glacial melt was based on a nearly decade-old interview of one climate scientist in a science magazine, The New Scientist, and that hard scientific evidence to support that figure is lacking. The scientist, Dr. Syed Hasnain, a glacier specialist with the government of Sikkim and currently a fellow at the TERI research institute in Delhi, studies “index glaciers” and has more recently suggested that only small glaciers would disappear entirely.

The real lesson isn’t that glaciers aren’t melting, though. That’s an issue for measurement and scientific fact, rather than opinion. The real lesson is that a lot of the statements coming out of the UN’s IPCC aren’t trustworthy because they’re based on little to no data, or insufficient data to support their rather grave claims.

This from the Wall Street Journal:

“The IPCC report said Himalayan glaciers are receding faster than anywhere else in the world and that’s not correct,” said J. Graham Cogley, a professor of geography at Trent University in Ontario. Dr. Cogley is a glaciologist who contributed to another part of the 2007 IPCC report and is one of the first people to track down some of the inconsistencies in the section on Himalayan glaciers. He added that the 2035 date was also likely wrong.

“There’s a failure to review this data adequately by qualified experts,” Prof. Cogley said.

Indeed. Climate science is likely to be — one day — a credible field based on rational reflection of credible data. But it’s not that today. More to the big point, though, is that one gets the feeling wheels are coming off a great juggernaut set in motion. It was either going to break through all adversaries and carry the day or it was going to break down, rust up, and die.

Of course, alarmism won’t die. It will move to regulatory efforts at the Environmental Protection Agency or it will try to get random chemicals banned because it’s easier to scare a nation in 30-second soundbites than to educate about real risk ratios. But at least this part of the alarmist agenda appears to be melting away just a bit.