2010/1/19 asahi

「国連の気候変動に関する政府間パネル（ＩＰＣＣ）が２００７年に出した第４次評価報告書で、ヒマラヤの氷河が「このまま地球温 暖化が続くと、２０３５年までに消失する可能性が非常に高い」とした記述について科学的根拠がなかったと、英紙サンデー・タイムズが１７日付で報じた。

　ＩＰＣＣ報告書は世界の一線の研究者約１千人が学術雑誌に掲載された論文やデータなどを元に作成しており、これだけで報告書の結論が揺らぐものではないが、地球温暖化懐疑派の攻撃材料がまた一つ増えることになる。

　同紙によると、報告書のこの記述は、一般向け英科学誌「ニューサイエンティスト」が１９９９年に掲載したインドの科学者への電話インタビューが根 拠だったが、この科学者が「憶測だった」ことを認めたという。この記述は、世界自然保護基金（ＷＷＦ）が０５年に作成した報告書のデータにも使われ、第４ 次報告書はＷＷＦの報告書を参考文献にしていた。

　世界気象機関（ＷＭＯ）と国連環境計画（ＵＮＥＰ）の呼びかけで８９年に設立されたＩＰＣＣの影響力は大きく、０７年にはノーベル平和賞をゴア米元副大統領と共同受賞している。

　英紙テレグラフは、ＩＰＣＣのパチャウリ議長が、温室効果ガスの排出量取引などでもうけている銀行の顧問なども務め、その報酬はパチャウリ氏が理 事長を務める団体に振り込まれていると報じている。同紙はパチャウリ氏のＩＰＣＣ議長としての活動が、団体の活動拡大につながった可能性を示唆。「利益相 反」の疑いに言及している。

　ＩＰＣＣ報告書に関しては昨年１１月にも、基礎になった気温データで温暖化を誇張したとも受け取れる研究者間の電子メールのやりとりが盗み出される騒ぎ「クライメートゲート」が発覚している。

2010/1/19 AFP

Indian minister slams UN body on glacier research

India's environment minister slammed the UN's top climate body in comments published Tuesday, claiming its doomsday warning about Himalayan glaciers was not based on "scientific evidence."

The controversy focuses on a reference in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) landmark 2007 report that said the chances of Himalayan glaciers "disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high."

"The IPCC claim that glaciers will vanish by 2035 was not based on an iota of scientific evidence," minister Jairam Ramesh told the Hindustan Times.

"The IPCC has to do a lot of answering on how it reached the 2035 figure, which created such a scare."

On Monday, the IPCC's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, told AFP that the panel would review the 2035 figure.

Ramesh said he felt "vindicated" after repeatedly challenging the IPCC's work on glaciers. He believes there is no "conclusive scientific evidence" linking global warming to the melting of glaciers.

In November, Ramesh backed a study by Indian scientists which supported his view, prompting Pachauri to label his support "arrogant."

The Nobel-winning IPCC is already under attack over hacked email exchanges which skeptics say reflected attempts to skew the evidence for global warming.

The new row has boosted climate skeptics, who have questioned scientific evidence behind global warming in the past and are on a roll after a scandal last month dubbed "climategate."

Emails from scientists at Britain's University of East Anglia, a top centre for climate research, were leaked and seized on by sceptics as evidence that experts twisted data in order to dramatise global warming.

Ramesh conceded to the Hindustan Times that "most glaciers are in a poor state," but said they were receding at different rates and a few were even advancing.

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January 18, 2010 　NYT

U.N. Panel’s Glacier Warning Is Criticized as Exaggerated

A much-publicized estimate from a United Nations panel about the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers from climate change is coming under fire as a gross exaggeration.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in 2007 - the same year it shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore - that it was “very likely” that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 if current warming trends continued.

10.6.2 The Himalayan glaciers

Himalayan glaciers cover about three million hectares or 17% of the mountain area as compared to 2.2% in the Swiss Alps. They form the largest body of ice outside the polar caps and are the source of water for the innumerable rivers that flow across the Indo-Gangetic plains. Himalayan glacial snowfields store about 12,000 km³ of freshwater. About 15,000 Himalayan glaciers form a unique reservoir which supports perennial rivers such as the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra which, in turn, are the lifeline of millions of people in South Asian countries (Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, India and Bangladesh). The Gangetic basin alone is home to 500 million people, about 10% of the total human population in the region.

Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km² by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005).

The receding and thinning of Himalayan glaciers can be attributed primarily to the global warming due to increase in anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases. The relatively high population density near these glaciers and consequent deforestation and land-use changes have also adversely affected these glaciers.

That date has been much quoted and a cause for enormous consternation, since hundreds of millions of people in Asia rely on ice and snow melt from these glaciers for their water supply.

The panel, the United Nations’ scientific advisory body on climate change, ranks its conclusions using a probability scale in which “very likely” means there is greater than 90 percent chance that an event will occur.

But it now appears that the estimate about Himalayan glacial melt was based on a decade-old interview of one climate scientist (Syed Hasnain of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, ) in a science magazine, The New Scientist, and that hard scientific evidence to support that figure is lacking. The scientist, Dr. Syed Hasnain, a glacier specialist with the government of the Indian state of Sikkim and currently a fellow at the TERI research institute in Delhi, said in an e-mail message that he was “misquoted” about the 2035 estimate in The New Scientist article. He has more recently said that his research suggests that only small glaciers could disappear entirely.

The panel, which relies on contributions from hundreds of scientists, is considering whether to amend the estimate or remove it.

“The I.P.C.C. considers this a very serious issue and we’re working very hard to set the record straight as soon as we can,” said Christopher Field, co-chairman of the panel’s section that was responsible for the report, which deals with impacts, adaptation and vulnerability.

He noted that the potentially erroneous figure in question had appeared only in the panel’s full report of more than 1,000 pages and had been omitted in later summary documents that the panel produced to guide policy. The summaries said only that the Himalayan glaciers “could decay at very rapid rates” if warming continued. Such documents are produced after panel members review a full-length report, although if a figure in the report is deemed to be in error, it is supposed to be removed.

Still, the revelation is the latest in a string of events that climate change skeptics have seized on to support their contention that fears about warming are unfounded, or at least overblown. Late last year, hackers obtained private e-mail messages from leading researchers at the University of East Anglia in England suggesting they were altering the presentation of some data in a way that emphasized the human influence on climate change.

The flawed estimate raises more questions about the panel’s vetting procedures than it does about the melting of Himalayan glaciers, which most scientists believe is a major problem. But the panel’s reports are the basis for global policy and their conclusions are widely heeded.

“The Himalayan glaciers will not disappear by 2035 - that is an overstatement,” said Dr. Bodo Bookhagen, an assistant professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara who studies the effect of climate change at high altitudes. “That number somehow got incorporated into the I.P.C.C. report, and that probably shouldn’t have happened.”

Still, he added: “It is very clear that there is glacier retreat and that it has devastating impact.”

There is mounting proof that accelerating glacial melt is occurring, although the specifics are poorly defined, in part because these glaciers are remote and poorly studied.

At an international conference last year on Asia’s glaciers, held at the University of California, San Diego, Yao Tandong, a Chinese glaciologist who specializes in the Tibetan Plateau, said, “Studies indicate that by 2030 another 30 percent will disappear; by 2050, 40 percent; and by the end of the century 70 percent.” He added: “Actually we don’t know much about process and impacts of the disappearance. That’s why we need an international effort.”

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January 17, 2010 .timesonline.co.u

World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.

Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said he would recommend that the claim about glaciers be dropped: "If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, than I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments."

The IPCC's reliance on Hasnain's 1999 interview has been highlighted by Fred Pearce, the journalist who carried out the original interview for the New Scientist. Pearce said he rang Hasnain in India in 1999 after spotting his claims in an Indian magazine. Pearce said: "Hasnain told me then that he was bringing a report containing those numbers to Britain. 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 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 the New Scientist. But it was a campaigning report rather than an academic paper so it was not subjected to any formal scientific review. Despite this it rapidly became a key source for the IPCC when Lal and his colleagues came to write the section on the Himalayas.

When finally published, the IPCC report did give its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the glaciers melting was "very high". The IPCC defines this as having a probability of greater than 90%.

The report read: "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate."

However, glaciologists find such figures inherently ludicrous, pointing out that most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035 unless there was a huge global temperature rise. The maximum rate of decline in thickness seen in glaciers at the moment is 2-3 feet a year and most are far lower.

Professor Julian Dowdeswell, director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, said: "Even a small glacier such as the Dokriani glacier is up to 120 metres [394ft] thick. A big one would be several hundred metres thick and tens of kilometres long. The average is 300 metres thick so to melt one even at 5 metres a year would take 60 years. That is a lot faster than anything we are seeing now so the idea of losing it all by 2035 is unrealistically high.”

Some scientists have questioned how the IPCC could have allowed such a mistake into print. Perhaps the most likely reason was lack of expertise. Lal himself admits he knows little about glaciers. "I am not an expert on glaciers.and I have not visited the region so I have to rely on credible published research. The comments in the WWF report were made by a respected Indian scientist and it was reasonable to assume he knew what he was talking about," he said.

Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as "voodoo science".

Last week the IPCC refused to comment so it has yet to explain how someone who admits to little expertise on glaciers was overseeing such a report. Perhaps its one consolation is that the blunder was spotted by climate scientists who quickly made it public.

The lead role in that process was played by Graham Cogley, a geographer from Trent University in Ontario, Canada, who had long been unhappy with the IPCC's finding.

He traced the IPCC claim back to the New Scientist and then contacted Pearce. Pearce then re-interviewed Hasnain, who confirmed that his 1999 comments had been "speculative", and published the update in the New Scientist.

Cogley said: "The reality, that the glaciers are wasting away, is bad enough. But they are not wasting away at the rate suggested by this speculative remark and the IPCC report. The problem is that nobody who studied this material bothered chasing the trail back to the original point when the claim first arose. It is ultimately a trail that leads back to a magazine article and that is not the sort of thing you want to end up in an IPCC report.”

Pearce said the IPCC's reliance on the WWF was "immensely lazy" and the organisation need to explain itself or back up its prediction with another scientific source. Hasnain could not be reached for comment.

The revelation is the latest crack to appear in the scientific concensus over climate change. It follows the so-called climate-gate scandal, where British scientists apparently tried to prevent other researchers from accessing key date. Last week another row broke out when the Met Office criticised suggestions that sea levels were likely to rise 1.9m by 2100, suggesting much lower increases were likely.

December 23, 2009 www.environmentalleader.com

UN Climate Chief Faces Conflict of Interest Accusations

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and head of India’s Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), has been accused of conflict of interest, for his involvement in fossil fuel, venture capital, alternative energy, research and motor vehicle companies, reports The Australian.

Just days after he attacked global warming skeptics in his keynote address at the Copenhagen climate conference, two British journalists suggested that Pachauri was profiting from his connections and that the climate debate was being run by scientists making money from the carbon credits market, reports The Australian.

Pachauri recently said the world could still cap global warming at lower levels - 1.5 degrees Celsius versus 2 degrees Celsius - and the Group of Eight industrialized nations (G8) need to set firm commitments on reductions by 2020.

The Daily Telegraph questions Pachauri’s connections with TERI, the Tata Energy Research Institute, which was renamed to The Energy and Resources Institute in 2003, stating that Pachauri does not mention that he is funded by Tata on his Web site, reports The Australian.

According to the Telegraph article, TERI was formed in 1974 by India’s largest privately-owned business empire, the Tata Group, with interests in steel, cars, energy, chemicals, telecommunications and insurance companies.

Pachauri became director of TERI in 1981 and director-general in 2001, a title he holds today, although he has been a ranking official in the IPCC since 1997, when he became vice-chairman, according to the Telegraph article, reports the Examiner.com.

The Telegraph article also states that Pachauri has been investing billions of dollars in organizations that depend on IPCC’s policy recommendations, which include banks, oil, and energy companies. In addition, the article notes that Pachauri also holds many posts, as director or advisor to many organizations that play a leading role in the global climate industry.

The issue of potential conflict of interest was brought to the public’s attention last week when two leading climate skeptics handed Pachauri an open letter after a lecture that challenged some scientific findings of IPCC’s 2007 report, and questioned why the report did not declare his personal interest in many organizations set to profit from its findings, reports the Telegraph.

The letter was circulated to all the 192 national conference delegations, calling on them to dismiss Pachauri as IPCC chairman because of his conflicting interests, reports the Telegraph.

In response, Pachauri told the Times of India: “These are a pack of lies from people who are getting desperate. They want to go after the guy whose voice is being heard. I haven’t pocketed a single penny from my association with companies and institutes. All honoraria that I get goes to TERI and to its Light a Billion Lives campaign for reaching solar power to people without electricity. All my dealings are totally above board.”

Pachauri also cited in the article that the previous IPCC chairman was in the World Bank and the one before that was a professor. He was quoted in the article: “Can you then say the university benefited from his association with IPCC? The people who have flung these charges are part of the same vested interest group which hacked the server of UK’s East Anglia University. They are getting desperate because the world is now serious about moving away from fossil fuels. I want to ask them how much money they spent in the operation? Hacking a server is a costly exercise.”