IPCC admits Glacier claim just speculation

[H]

Why is one thread never enough for links like this?

Because people are disgusted by the lies and deceit of the IPCC!

UN climate panel blunders again over Himalayan glaciers - Times Online

The chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Rajendra Pachauri's Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion's share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers.

It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus. The revelation comes just a week after The Sunday Times highlighted serious scientific flaws in the IPCC's 2007 benchmark report on the likely impacts of global warming.

The Carnegie money was specifically given to aid research into "the potential security and humanitarian impact on the region" as the glaciers began to disappear. Pachauri has since acknowledged that this threat, if it exists, will take centuries to have any serious effect.

The money was initially given to the Global Centre, an Icelandic Foundation which then channelled it, with Carnegie's involvement, to TERI.

The cash was acknowledged by TERI in a press release, issued on January 15, just before the glacier scandal became public, in which Pachauri repeated the claims of imminent glacial melt.

It said: ""According to predictions of scientific merit they may indeed melt away in several decades."

The same release also quoted Dr Syed Hasnain, the glaciologist who, back in 1999, made the now discredited claim that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035.

He now heads Pachauri's glaciology unit at TERI which sought the grants and which is carrying out the glacier research.

Critics point out that Hasnain, of all people, should have known the claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 was bogus because he was meant to be a leading glaciologist specialising in the Himalayas.

Any suggestion that TERI has repeated an unchecked scientific claim without checking it, in order to win grants, could prove hugely embarrassing for Pachauri and the IPCC.

The second grant, from the EU, totalled £2.5m and was designed to "to assess the impact of Himalayan glaciers retreat".

It was part of the EU's HighNoon project, launched last May to fund research into how India might adapt to loss of glaciers.

In one presentation at last May's launch, Anastasios Kentarchos, of the European Commission's Climate Change and Environmental Risks Unit, specifically cited the bogus IPCC claims about glacier melt as a reason for pouring EU taxpayers' money into the project.

Pachauri spoke at the same presentation and Hasnain is understood to have been present in the audience.

The EU grant was split between leading European research institutions including Britain's Met Office, with TERI getting a major but unspecified share because it represented the host country.

The "Glaciergate" affair has seen Pachauri come under increasing pressure in India, prompting him to call a press conference yesterday (Saturday) where he dismissed calls for his resignation and said no action would be taken against the authors of the erroneous section of the IPCC report.

He said: "I have no intention of resigning from my position," adding the errors were unintentional and not significant in comparison to the entire report.

However, other questions remain. One of the most important is in connection with Pachauri's earnings.

In an interview with The Sunday Times he said his only income came from his salary at TERI. However TERI does not publish his salary and he refused to divulge it.

In India questions are also being asked about Pachauri's links with GloriOil, a Houston, Texas-based oil technology company that specialises in recovering extra oil from declining oil fields . Pachauri is listed as a founder and scientific advisor.

Critics say it is odd for a man committed to decarbonising energy supplies to be linked to an oil company.

[ibis]

Why is one thread never enough for links like this?

Because people are disgusted by the existence and output of the IPCC, and will happily suck up any point, no matter how minor, where they can score a PR point against them.

[Son_Of_The_Republic]

The glaciers are melting! The glaciers are melting! The glaciers are…uhhhhh…never mind.

Turns out the IPCC’s chicken little story that all the Himalayan glaciers are melting is just another exaggeration. Or fraud. Take your choice. You know, like the stats coming out of East Anglia CRU. And its claim that Antarctica is melting. And that Greenland’s ice cap is melting. And that sea levels are rising. And that the polar bears are dying. Fact is, some glaciers are retreating, but many others around the world are growing.

“But how is that possible? How can glaciers be growing when the world is warming up like a package of Jiffy-Pop in a microwave?”

Here are a dozen glaciers (or groups of glaciers) around the world that are growing almost as quickly as global warming skepticism.

12 more glaciers that haven?t heard the news about global warming | IHatetheMedia

[Thac0man]

So much for the reliability of the IPCC!

As long as they keep pumping out reports that seem tailored to a certain audiance, they will get support from some quaters (and more importantly for them apparently, funding). A couple more major gaffs though, like the two big ones they have just had, and not only the IPCC is finished, but the entire climate change action campaign gets booted back a few years. Is that important? Hard to say. To many people who support the IPCC, obviously not, but to a great many, like myself, who see climate change as a serious issue, it would be very grave.

We have now seen this report, which was old and never peer validated and another one, linking natural disasters to climate change, been disproved. Despite millions upon millions being spent on the IPCC we are seeing precious little of its actual research and too much inacurate data they did not produce themselves and have not even bothered to check. So where exactly is the money going? A spotty teen with an internet connection could replicate their work, for free.

The IPCC is a beaurocatic gravy train slavishly churning out not the results of climate research, but ad hoc justifications for political statements made by non-scientists. And as long as the money keeps coming, they don't seem to care.

[ibis]

As long as they keep pumping out reports that seem tailored to a certain audiance, they will get support from some quaters (and more importantly for them apparently, funding). A couple more major gaffs though, like the two big ones they have just had, and not only the IPCC is finished, but the entire climate change action campaign gets booted back a few years. Is that important? Hard to say. To many people who support the IPCC, obviously not, but to a great many, like myself, who see climate change as a serious issue, it would be very grave.

We have now seen this report, which was old and never peer validated and another one, linking natural disasters to climate change, been disproved. Despite millions upon millions being spent on the IPCC we are seeing precious little of its actual research and too much inacurate data they did not produce themselves and have not even bothered to check. So where exactly is the money going? A spotty teen with an internet connection could replicate their work, for free.

The IPCC is a beaurocatic gravy train slavishly churning out not the results of climate research, but ad hoc justifications for political statements made by non-scientists. And as long as the money keeps coming, they don't seem to care.

There's a misunderstanding of the role of the IPCC there, though. They don't do any research themselves - they're purely a review body. Within the main report, they are limited to only using peer-reviewed material in the review process, the value of which is the avoidance of exactly this kind of issue. Having said that, even using peer-reviewed science isn't going to prevent the IPCC from ever issuing an inaccurate statement, because the science they use in a review may be contradicted by later research. That politicians cherry-pick the IPCC's findings for usefully dramatic quotes demonstrates very little about the IPCC, since all politicians do that with all science.

I'm not sure what the point of anyone on p.ie calling anything a "gravy train" is any more. I can't think of anything that someone (other than p.ie posters) does that hasn't been called that at some point. It would be nice to know who you think is making money out of it, and for you to show that they are doing so, and that that money is far and above what they could earn by any alternative route open to them. Otherwise it's just work, not a "gravy train".

[Son_Of_The_Republic]

I'm not sure what the point of anyone on p.ie calling anything a "gravy train" is any more. I can't think of anything that someone (other than p.ie posters) does that hasn't been called that at some point. It would be nice to know who you think is making money out of it,.

You can't be serious?

The chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Rajendra Pachauri's Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion's share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers.

It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus

UN climate chief Rajendra Pachauri 'got grants through bogus claims' - Times Online

[Son_Of_The_Republic]

Only one in four American Meteorological Society broadcast meteorologists agrees with United Nations claims that humans are primarily responsible for recent global warming, a survey published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society reports.

The survey results contradict the oft-repeated assertion that a consensus of scientists believes humans are causing a global warming crisis…

Meteorologists agree: man-made warming isn’t real | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

[realist]

The strange thing about the Himalayan Glacier melting saga is that the Gangotri glacier IS in fact melting but it is entirely down to local warming caused by a large increase in the number of people visiting what used to be a sacred Hindu shrine which has developed into a massive tourist industry.

If you google "Amarnath gangotri tour" you will see what a huge business this has become. The article below was written in 2004 in which the writer conveys his concerns about the impact of the increase in tourism to the area and the plan to use ice skating rink technology to prevent the expecting melting.

Today Amarnath Yatri is carried out for one month only this year it was extended to one and a half months and may be in future it is extended to two months, but must end by August 30 the day of Raksha Bandhan. After that no one goes there and the forest gets about 10 months to recoup its ecological health, but when pre-fabricated insulated shelters with heating arrangements inside, will be installed, people will want to stay there through out the summer season till late autumn. Even after that the structures cannot be left empty, because the militant will destroy them. Hence thousands of security personals shall have to stay to look after the shelter and need to cook the food, heat water for baths, washing clothes, iron the uniforms and prepare teas. Fuel will be had by cutting trees, if there are edible wild animals they will be killed and eaten and thus the disaster of Pahalgam will be complete. What a great calamity it will be if the forests catches fire and engulf the holy cave of Amarnath itself, will there be any mending of the holocaust afterwards. To say the pre-fabricated shelter will be echo friendly is pure humbug, because heat created in the fixtures will be ultimately absorbed by the forests itself. This will lead to heating up of the atmosphere there, with far reaching dire consequences. The Shrine Board authorities seem to be alive to the hazard, they are reported to have said:"In the plan of SABS (Kashmir branch of the shrine board trust) preservation of the Holy Lingum had been proposed, which melts due to the heat, generated by the humans assembled at the crowded cave. The shrine board had planed to use modern scientific technology for the lingum' preservations taking cue from the Japanese Ice skating rink techniques and in this connection a high level team from Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) was invited to install the necessary high techniques equipment."
Kashmir Watch :: In-depth coverage on Kashmir conflict

And from 2007:

With India’s economic boom, more tour operators are offering commercialized, package tours to holy sites for India’s increasingly mobile and affluent middle class. Some even have helicopters on call.

"Plastic rubbish is found littered everywhere, nearby rivers are filled with human waste and roads have been built bringing in daily buses packed with pilgrims which is contaminating the air," says Shruti Shukla from WWF India. More and more trees are also being felled to make way for upscale hotels, restaurants and more accessible roads.

Environmentalists say that the combined effect of these activities is an accelerated melting of the glaciers.

Pilgrims' Plague Destroying Himalayas : TreeHugger

[Son_Of_The_Republic]

Amplification of Global Warming by Carbon-Cycle Feedback Significantly Less Than Thought, Study Suggests

from ScienceDaily (Jan. 28, 2010) — A new estimate of the feedback between temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration has been derived from a comprehensive comparison of temperature and CO2 records spanning the past millennium.

The result, which is based on more than 200,000 individual comparisons, implies that the amplification of current global warming by carbon-cycle feedback will be significantly less than recent work has suggested.

New paper in Nature on CO2 amplification: “it’s less than we thought” Watts Up With That?

[SAT]

Amplification of Global Warming by Carbon-Cycle Feedback Significantly Less Than Thought, Study Suggests



New paper in Nature on CO2 amplification: “it’s less than we thought” Watts Up With That?

Seems the theories on positive water vapour feedback need to be rethought as well :mrgreen:

Water vapour could be behind warming slowdown

Mysterious changes in the stratosphere may have offset greenhouse effect.

A puzzling drop in the amount of water vapour high in the Earth's atmosphere is now on the list of possible culprits causing average global temperatures to flatten out over the past decade, despite ever-increasing greenhouse-gas emissions.
snip
Average temperatures at the coldest point in the stratosphere — about 16 kilometres above the tropics — have fallen by about 1 °C in the past decade, says Bill Randel, who heads the atmospheric chemistry division at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. Colder temperatures freeze out water vapour that might otherwise have entered the stratosphere. But, Randel says, "We don't really understand why that 1-degree temperature change occurred."

They really do need to revisit climate change from the bottom up. Instead of twisting data to fit the models they need to design models based on the latest empirical data or just admit the complexity of climate is beyond them.