"Eric Gisin" wrote in message
...
Two important articles from the UK today, this long one from the
centre-left Economist.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsb...nd_ipcc_report

Accentuate the negative

Jul 5th 2010, 10:11 by The Economist online

FOR everyone else it was the glaciers: for the Dutch it was the flooding.
Last January errors in
the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) hit the
headlines. The chapter on
Asia in the report by the IPCC's second working group, charged with
looking at the impact of
climatye change and adapting to it, mistakenly claimed that the Himalayan
glaciers would be gone by
2035. This contradicted some reasonably basic physics, had not been
predicted by the glacier
specialists in the first working group (which deals with the natural
science of past and future
climate change) and was unsupported by any evidence. There was a report
from the 1990s which said
something similar about all the world's non-polar glaciers, but it gave
the date as 2350. Then
there was a crucial typo and some shoddy referencing. Nevertheless the
IPCC's chair, Rajendra
Pachauri, had lashed out at people bringing the criticism up, accusing
them of "voodoo science". He
then had to eat his words, and set up, with Ban Ki-moon, a panel to look
into ways the IPCC might
be improved.



http://www.skepticalscience.com/IPCC...-glaciers.html
The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report contains a mistake. This is not the first
inaccuracy to be found in the AR4 - there have been several papers
demonstrating where IPCC predictions have underestimated the climate
response to CO2 emissions.......

http://www.skepticalscience.com/ipcc...-consensus.htm

However, this time the climate response has been overestimated.
Specifically, the IPCC AR4 predicted the Himalayan glaciers would disappear
by 2035 which is decidedly not the case. What's the significance of this
error? To determine this, let's look at how it happened and the broader
context.

......

The IPCC error on the 2035 prediction was unfortunate and it's important
that such mistakes are avoided in future publications through more rigorous
review. But the central message of the Synthesis Report, the concluding
document of the IPCC AR4, is confirmed by the peer reviewed literature. The
Himalayan glaciers are of vital importance to half a billion people. Most of
this crucial resource is disappearing at an accelerating rate.



Rob