Himalayan glaciers
tlambert | February 5, 2010Bidisha Banerjee and George Collins have written the definitive account of the error in the WG2 report about Himalayan glaciers:
Dozens of articles and analyses of this situation, whether dashed-off blog posts or New York Times coverage, exhibit a curious consistency. Not a single article or analysis appears to include all relevant issues without introducing at least one substantial error. It's as though the original documents contained a curse which has spread to infect every commentator and reporter. The curse seems to stem from not reading sources carefully (or at all), which, ironically,…
tlambert | January 29, 2010You can add the George Kaser to the list that includes Pielke Jr, Latif and Lal. It's like he can't help himself.
Rose claimed that he was told by Kaser that he wrote to Lal:
I'm not the only person in disagreement with Dr Lal. Georg Kaser, the Austrian glaciologist, insists (indeed, he told me last week) he wrote to Lal, warning him not to include the 2035 glacier melting date in AR4. Lal says he got no such letter.
But Kaser says that he didn't write to Lal:
Dr. Kaser, who has been a report author and has also studied the retreating snows around Mount Kilimanjaro, said Monday in a…
tlambert | January 27, 2010There have been new developments in the Rosegate, the scandal about the way David Rose sexed up his story about the IPCC and the Himalayan glaciers. Andrew Revkin has posted an email from Murari Lal, the scientist that Rose verballed:
I am not a Glaciologist but a Climatologist and the statement attributed to me in "Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn't been verified" By David Rose in UK Daily Mail on 24th January 2010 has been wrongly placed. I never said this story at any time and strongly condemn the writer for attributing this to me.
More specifically, I never said during my conversation…
tlambert | January 26, 2010Imagine, if you will, that the emails stolen from CRU had included fawning comments from an MSM journalist to a climate scientist like this:
As a veteran member of the MSM (Vanity Fair and the UK's Mail on Sunday) may I state for the record: Sir, I salute you. Bravo!
or this:
without Steve's brilliant work and this magnificent website, it could not have been written.
What do you think the denialists would have said? Since a perfectly innocuous query from Seth Borenstein in the stolen emails lead to Anthony Watts calling for "AP to remove Seth Borenstein as 'science reporter'", you can bet…
tlambert | January 19, 2010Newspapers such as the London Times are reporting that the IPCC is about to retract something from the AR4 WG2 report:
A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.
The claim was indeed wrong. John Nielsen-Gammon has written a detailed analysis of the error with an update here. I've discovered a bit more about it, which I will get to presently, but first I want to look at the Times statement that it was a "central claim" and the New York Times statement that it was a "much-publicized estimate".
Actually, the estimate does…