A few weeks ago there was some commentary about the Himalayan glaciers cock-up at the IPCC. The claim was that a paper had been given that predicted the melting of the glaciers by 2350. The IPCC cited the paper in one of its reports but messed up the date, claiming that it was 2035 rather than 2350. (What's a few centuries when there's so much money at stake?)

I said: "I've been paying some attention to that, expecting someone to do a definitive analysis of the issue." This is the best so far as I know.

It turns out that the 2035 value is not just wrong, but when confronted with the error, the IPCC leadership apparently has refused to look into, clarify or even admit that there may be a problem in its report.

In a blog posting today John Nielsen-Gammon, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M, confirms claims first raised by J. Graham Cogley, a glaciologist in the Department of Geography at Trent University (which were reported on my father's blog and then by the BBC). Here is an excerpt from Nielson-Gammon's posting:

To recap, the available evidence indicates that the IPCC authors of this section relied upon a secondhand, unreferreed source which turned out to be unreliable, and failed to identify this source. As a result, the IPCC has predicted the likely loss of most or all of Himalaya's glaciers by 2035 with apparently no peer-reviewed scientific studies to justify such a prediction and at least one scientific study (Kotlyakov) saying that such a disappearance is too fast by a factor of ten!

This could have been a small, inconsequential error. The WG2 Chapter 10 authors did not highlight the prediction as a key finding in their executive summary, nor does it appear in the summary for policymakers. But such an astounding prediction could not help but attract attention. And it has long since become effectively common knowledge that the glaciers were going to vanish by 2035.

I've heard that 2035 figure screeched by ding bats - especially on mailing lists. They all dismissed the contrary evidence by citing Pachauri who had dismissed the report saying it was not "peer reviewed" and had few "scientific citations". Of course, the original claim was not peer reviewed and had no "scientific citations", but that's not surprising coming from Pachauri and the IPCC.

That's what irks me greatly about the politicization of the climate issue. The info-sphere has been massively polluted by activists so that "common knowledge" on these issues is gibberish. No good can come of this.