More on IPCC Himalayan Glacier blunder

The story has just broken on the complete absence of scientific evidence for the IPCCs claim that the Himalayan glaciers will have all melted by 2035. But there is much more to the story than has been covered in the mainstream media.

In, "United Nations' blunder on glaciers exposed", Chris Hastings and Jonathan Leake from The Australian (January 18, 2010 12:00AM) said;

THE peak UN body on climate change has been dealt another humiliating blow to its credibility after it was revealed a central claim of one of its benchmark reports - that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 because of global warming - was based on a "speculative" claim by an obscure Indian scientist.
The 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming, appears to have simply adopted the untested opinions of the Indian glaciologist from a magazine article published in 1999.
The IPCC report claimed that the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish inside 30 years. But the scientists behind the warning have now admitted it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's report.
It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
Mr Hasnain, who was then the chairman of the International Commission on Snow and Ice's working group on Himalayan glaciology, has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research.
The revelation represents another embarrassing blow to the credibility of the IPCC, less than two months after the emergence of leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, which raised questions about the legitimacy of data published by the IPCC about global warming.
One email written by a scientist referred to ways of ensuring information that doubted the veracity of man-made climate change science did not appear in IPCC reports.
Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on Himalayan glaciers in the 2007 IPCC report, said on the weekend he was considering recommending that the claim about glaciers be dropped.
"If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, then I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments," Professor Lal said.
The IPCC's reliance on Mr Hasnain's 1999 interview has been highlighted by Fred Pearce, the journalist who carried out the original interview for New Scientist. Pearce said he rang Mr Hasnain in India in 1999 after spotting his claims in an Indian magazine.
"Hasnain told me then that he was bringing a report containing those numbers to Britain," Pearce said. "The report had not been peer reviewed or formally published in a scientific journal and it had no formal status so I reported his work on that basis.
"Since then I have obtained a copy and it does not say what Hasnain said. In other words, it does not mention 2035 as a date by which any Himalayan glaciers will melt. However, he did make clear that his comments related only to part of the Himalayan glaciers, not the whole massif."
The New Scientist report was apparently forgotten until 2005 when environmental group WWF cited it in a report called An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China. The report credited Hasnain's 1999 interview with New Scientist. But it was a campaigning report rather than an academic paper.
Despite this it rapidly became a key source for the IPCC when Professor Lal and his colleagues came to write the section on the Himalayas.When published, the IPCC report gave its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the melting of the glaciers was "very likely". The IPCC defines "very likely" as having a probability of greater than 90 per cent.
Glaciologists find such figures inherently ludicrous, pointing out that most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of metres thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035 unless there was a huge global temperature rise.
Julian Dowdeswell, director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, said: "A small glacier such as the Dokriani glacier is up to 120m thick. A big one would be several hundred metres thick and tens of kilometres long. The average is 300m thick so to melt one at 5m a year would take 60 years."
Some scientists have questioned how the IPCC could have allowed such a mistake into print. Professor Lal admits he knows little about glaciers."

What the reports don't mention is the fact that most of these glaciers, like the largest, Siachen, go from altitude 6000m to 7000m. And most junior high school geography students will know that temperature declines by 1 degree C for each 100 metre increase in altitude. And that means the top of these glaciers are a full 10C colder than the bottom. It also means that temperatures would need to rise by a massive 10C for the glaciers to melt completely.

One must ask, what body of science is currently claiming that CO2 emissions will be so high as to produce the kind of CO2 levels (2000ppm or more) that would produce a 10C increase in global temperature? Answer: None. IPCC head, Pachauri, has obtained funding for his own consulting business on the basis of a completely preposterous claim.

Ice Sheets Calve, Get Used To It

In early April 2009 a large portion of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica broke away. And Jennifer Marohasy, at http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/04/wilkins-ice-shelf-collapse/#comments was moved to ask;

"Given it is still really cold at the Antarctic, is it really very scientific to blame global warming for the likely collapse of the Wilkins Ice Shelf? How good is the evidence supporting this hypothesis as the possible cause of the possible shelf collapse, as opposed to, say, ice growth generating internal stress or undersea volcanic activity?"

To which I responded, "Ice sheets calve, get used to it."

The reason they calve is that the annual precipitation on the Antarctic coast is over 200mm a year, or 2 metres per decade, or 10 metres every half century. If the ice sheet was not attached to land based ice, and water temperatures remained below zero C, then the floating sheet would drop by 9 metres every half century as the total ice mass adjusts equilibrium in water.

But when the ice sheet is attached to land ice it cannot adjust it's mass in water (sink) without severing the attachment to the land ice. Ten metres of ice weighs 9 tonnes per square metre, 90,000 tonnes per hectare and 9 million tonnes per square kilometre. And that makes for an absolute $hitload of weight to be defying gravity with.

And the wider the ice shelf is, the more powerful the leverage becomes at the interface between land and shelf ice.

Interestingly, ocean surface temperatures for this area in March 2009 were zero C. Below the surface, at the bottom of the floating ice, the temperature was lower still. And if the break had taken place in January there may have been a very slim case in support of warming as the cause of the calving. But Southern Hemisphere temperatures have declined over the past decade to a greater extent than Northern Hemisphere temperatures.

So how can the Wilkins Ice Shelf calving be caused by global warming when there has been no warming for the past ten years?"

Choking on Chinese emission projections

The Climate Cretins are whipping up a classic "scarenario" with projections of Chinese CO2 emissions over the next few decades. A number of articles on the same theme were referenced at http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/002763.html

And it is important to note the common thread in this sorry sequence of beat-ups. There is a very pregnant "IF" at the start of each claim, as per Alexis Madrigal at Wired, 8 Feb 2008. http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/02/chinas-2030-co2.html He said;

"If China's carbon usage keeps pace with its economic growth, the country's carbon dioxide emissions will reach 8 gigatons a year by 2030, which is equal to the entire world's CO2 production today." and;

"If the Chinese economy steps into our (USA)carbon footprint, all other greenhouse gas reduction efforts will be for naught."

Yes, you are right, it is the same old exaggerated IPCC dogs vomit, served for your repeat consumption.

According to http://www.nationmaster.com/red/graph/env_co2_emi_percap-environment-co2-emissions-per-capita US emissions per capita are 19.48 tonnes CO2, while the highest amongst asian nations is Singapore with 13.813 tonnes, followed by Japan with only 9.612 tonnes. And given the cultural similarities and comparable population densities there is absolutely no excuse for trying to imply that China would ever reach the emission footprint of the USA.

These authors are seeking to imply that a US emissions footprint is some sort of natural or logical ideal at the top of a heirarchy of emission needs. As if all the rest of the world, with lower emissions, aspires to this mythical, gas guzzling, place in the sun. Well, perhaps they should tell that to the French (5.992t/capita), the Swiss (5.58t/capita) and the Swedes (5.4166t/capita).

The simple facts are that if China or India ever reach a highly developed economic level it will, at most, be on the Japanese model, not the USA model. And one must ask, "where, exactly, would one fit just one Los Angeles style, low density, mega urban sprawl between Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing, let alone the 50 odd that would be required to match a US emissions footprint?"

Note that current Chinese emissions are 2.66 tonnes per capita. So even if there was no technology based emission dividend for the Chinese from the 34 French nuclear reactors they have just signed up for, a trebling of their emissions would put them on 8 tonnes per capita, with a standard of living (averaged from the least developed regions to the cities) just above that currently enjoyed by the South Koreans @ 7.34 tonnes per capita.

But given the scope for China to learn from both Japanese and Korean experience, and their plans for so many nuclear power stations, it is entirely reasonable to conclude that China will achieve OECD level economic development under a French, Swiss or Swedish emissions footprint between 5.0-6.0t CO2/capita.

And when this footprint is loaded into the various IPCC scenarios that assumed a range of economic levels in developing countries over the next century, and add the critical fact that emission levels plateau once economies achieve developed status, the entire climate change "Bunyip" is exposed as nothing more than a tattered, moonlighting duck with a megaphone.

Meanwhile, in the totally improbable case of a continuous annual economic growth of 10% per annum, matched by a similar increase in emissions over the 23 years to 2030, as envisaged in these preposterous articles, Chinese emissions would rise to 23.8 tonnes per capita. That is, 22% ABOVE the current US footprint, 147% above the current Japanese footprint, and more than 300% above the Swiss footprint.

You would have to put every Chinese adult in a Hummer to get anywhere near that outcome.

Clearly, these projected emission scenarios are a demonstration of either the most extreme ignorance of the relationship between energy and economics, or it is deliberate deception of the very worst kind with a callous disregard for the truth.

New perspectives on temperature change

There is a pressing need for new perspectives on Global Warming as the debate to date has been entirely shaped by the self serving graphics of the proponents, like the familiar one shown here. This tells us what the change has been but tells us nothing about when and where these changes have taken place within our range of seasonal variation.

The new graph below provides us with valuable new information on the exact nature and threat potential of Global Warming. The decadal change in the UK between the 1980's and 1990's produces a mean change in the order of 0.58C which exceeds the change in global mean temperatures for the past half century. The mean temperature for 1980-89 was 9.52C while the mean for 1990-99 was 10.10C. The global mean is made up of a number of such station records and it is important that we examine a station that exceeds the global mean so we can get a better understanding of how and when the actual warming has taken place.

In each decade the monthly maxima and minima are plotted with a decadal mean, maxima and minima value.

The most important thing to note is that most of the temperature increase is observed in the higher minimum monthly values rather than higher monthly maximums. And most of that has been in the winter months. For example, the lowest monthly mean for a February in the 1980's was -1.1C while the lowest February in the 1990's was +1.5C, the lowest mean for a December in the 1980's was 0.3C while the lowest mean for a December in the 1990's was 2.3C, and the lowest monthly mean for a January in the 1980's was 0.8C while the lowest mean for a January in the 1990's was 2.5C. These three months account for 0.525C of the decadal change of 0.58C.

But comparing the two decades also makes three things very clear. They are;

1 An increase in an annual mean temperature is sourced from changes that take place throughout the year, not just in the form of extreme mid summer temperatures as the climate mafia has encouraged the world to think.

2 Most of the temperature increases that contribute to a higher annual mean temperature are entirely within the normal range, in this case in the UK that is between -1.0C and +19C.

3 Of the 12 monthly maximums and 12 monthly minimums that make up an annual mean temperature figure, only two, the midsummer months, pose any sort of risk of exceeding the values that the full suite of flora and fauna at any given location have already proven they can cope with.

This latter point is critical in the light of the Climate Mafia's continually repeated claim that small changes to the global mean temperature can have far reaching implications for the biosphere. As can be observed in the UK data sets, the rise in Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer minimum temperatures, and the rise in Autumn, Winter and Spring maximum temperatures, poses zero to minimal threat to any of the flora and fauna species that have experienced those conditions. Indeed, in most cases this is an unambiguous benefit.

And even the threat from the higher midsummer maximums has been overstated for most of the planet. In the case of plant species there is no particular temperature at which an entire forest, species or genotype will suddenly collapse and die. The weaker individuals will die off first and their death will free up soil moisture and nutrients for the remaining ones. The end result will be a slightly lower density of vegetation cover with a slight compositional change in favour of grasses rather than trees in much the same way that composition changes with latitude and rainfall at present.

The same will apply with fauna. The weak will die off first as they already do in drought with a smaller core population that will then breed vigorously in response to the next cyclical change, as they have done for millennia. So next time you hear about "major implications" from minor changes in global mean temperatures, just walk the poor dears slowly through the monthly minimums and maximums that make up an annual mean temperature and ask them which species are put at risk by suffering through a mild winter.

Ian Mott

Hard Cover Maps reveal no shinking Arctic Ice Sheet

I have just checked this link to a BBC article that claims that Arctic ice coverage is still receding.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4290340.stm

"September 2005 will set a new record minimum in the amount of Arctic sea ice cover," said Mark Serreze, of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Boulder, Colorado.
"It's the least sea ice we've seen in the satellite record, and continues a pattern of extreme low extents of sea ice which we've now seen for the last four years," he told BBC News.

The map showing the change from 1979 to 2000 appears to show incontrovertable evidence that the ice sheet is shrinking. But, luckily, I was able to check the 1960 edition of the Readers Digest World Atlas, prepared under the direction of Frank Debenham, OBE, MA, DSC(hon) Emeritus Professor of Geography at Cambridge, that has plotted the extent of this ice sheet 20 years prior to the first satellite scan.

And surprise, surprise, the large tongues of ice that in 1979 were protruding between Novaya Zemla and Severnaya Zemla, and on the Eastern side of Severnaya Zemla, that is not there today, were also not there in the 1960's.

The BBC map is not clear enough to be certain but it appears that there may have actually been some minimal expansion in the ice limit between Svalbard and Severnaya Zemla. The only portion that does appear to have receded is a small section in the East Siberian Sea.

So while a short, totally inadequate, sample period may indicate a receding Arctic ice sheet, the evidence over a 40 year interval makes it clear that THERE IS NOT THE SLIGHTEST ROOM FOR DOUBT THAT THIS CLAIMED RECEDING TREND IS INTIRELY WITHIN THE RECENT HISTORICAL RANGE OF VARIATION.

Once again, we have so called "highly respected scientific teams" being caught out making extrapolations from limited data sets. It is not only incompetent but downright lazy to limit one's inquiry to the most convenient data sources. But when this is done in relation to a key evidentiary plank in the "Gullible Warming" debate it is inexcusable.