The chief of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said today that it would investigate claims that the group’s 2007 report made an erroneous claim that the Himalayan glaciers were receding faster than in any other part of the world and could “disappear altogether by 2035 if not sooner.”
This past weekend, Britain’s Sunday Times reported that the 2035 claim was taken from an interview with an Indian glaciologist in New Scientist a decade ago. Separately, last month the BBC quoted J. Graham Cogley of Trent University as saying that the IPCC authors “misread 2350 as 2035,” calling the 2035 forecast an “egregious” error.
“We will take a view of this,” the IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, said in comments broadcast on the CNN-IBN network.
India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, has repeatedly challenged the IPCC’s glacier claims, saying there is no “conclusive scientific evidence” linking global warming to the melting of glaciers (AFP/Yahoo News, Jan. 18). – PV