Written by byDavid Lungren at epw.senate.gov
January 21, 2010 – USA Today : U.N. apologizes for botched climate prediction – United Nations climate panel chiefs apologized Wednesday for a botched projection of all Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035. In an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change statement, group chairman Rajendra Pachauri and other officials acknowledged “poorly substantiated rates of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly.”
AP: Riddled with Errors WASHINGTON – Five glaring errors were discovered in one paragraph of the world’s most authoritative report on global warming, forcing the Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists who wrote it to apologize and promise to be more careful. The errors are in a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N.-affiliated body. All the mistakes appear in a subsection that suggests glaciers in the Himalayas could melt away by the year 2035 – hundreds of years earlier than the data actually indicates. The year 2350 apparently was transposed as 2035.
TIME: Himalayan Melting: How a Climate Panel Got It Wrong – The mistake is a black eye for the IPCC and for the climate science community as a whole. Climate scientists are still dealing with the Climategate controversy, which involved hacked e-mails from a major British climatology center that cast doubt on the solidity of evidence for global warming. It’s still not clear exactly how the error made it into the IPCC’s assessment, though climate scientists point out that the total document was thousands of pages long and that the Himalaya claim wasn’t included in the summary of the report, which was boiled down for policymakers and received the most attention from reviewers. “Honest mistakes do happen,” admits Benjamin Santer, a climate modeler at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “The bulk of the science is clear and compelling and rests on multiple lines of evidence,” not just one case.