聯合國報告稱：冰川融化全屬吹水

聯合國報告稱：喜馬拉雅冰川將25年內融化全為熱空氣UN report that said Himalayan glaciers would melt within 25 years was all hot air
By David Derbyshire
Last updated at 9:59 AM on 18th January 2010
Claims by the world's leading climate scientists that most of the Himalayan glaciers will vanish within 25 years were last night exposed as nonsense.
世界著名氣候學家宣稱，大部分的喜馬拉雅冰川將在25年內消失，在昨晚被暴露屬無稽之談。
The alarmist warning appeared two years ago in a highly influential report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
這危言聳聽的警告兩年前出現在聯合國跨政府氣候變化專門委員會的高影響性的報告內。
At the time the IPCC insisted that its report contained the latest and most detailed evidence yet of the risks of man-made climate change to the planet.
當時跨政府氣候變化專門委員會堅持，它的報告包含最新和最詳細的證據，為人為氣候變化對地球的風險。 Misleading: UN climate change report's claim that Himalayan glaciers would vanish within 25 years was based on 'pure speculation'
誤導：聯合國氣候變化報告聲稱，喜馬拉雅冰川將在25年內消失是建基於'純屬猜測'


But the experts behind the warning have now admitted their claim was not based on hard science - but a news story that appeared in the magazine New Scientist in the late 1990s.

That story was itself based on a telephone conversation with an Indian scientist who has since admitted it was little more than speculation.
The revelation is a major blow to the credibility of the IPCC which was set up to provide political leaders with clear, independent advice on climate change.

It follows the 'Climategate' email row in which scientists at the University of East Anglia appeared to have manipulated data to strengthen the case for man-made climate change
Dr Benny Peiser, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said: 'The IPCC review process has been shown on numerous occasions to lack transparency and due diligence.

'Its work is controlled by a tightly knit group of individuals who are completely convinced that they are right. As a result, conflicting data and evidence, even if published in peer reviewed journals, are regularly ignored, while exaggerated claims, even if contentious or not peer-reviewed, are often highlighted in IPCC reports.

'Not surprisingly, the IPCC has lost a lot of credibility in recent years. It is also losing the trust of more and more governments who are no longer following its advice - as the Copenhagen summit showed.'
The flawed claim appeared in chapter ten of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, which stated: '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.'
Rather than being based on a peer-reviewed, published scientific study, the claim was borrowed from a 2005 report by the campaigning green charity WWF.
The WWF, in turn, took the claim from a 1999 report in New Scientist. The magazine based its story on a phone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
Dr Hasnain now says the comment was 'pure speculation'.
The gaffe is a major embarrassment for the IPCC.

Yesterday Prof Murari Lal, who edited the section on glaciers in the IPCC report, told a Sunday newspaper: '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.'
Glacier experts are astonished it has taken so long to expose the blunder. Most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet thick and could not melt within 25 years. The quickest melting are shrinking at a rate of two to three feet of thickness a yearhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1243963/UN-science-report-stated-Himalayan-glaciers-melt-25-years-guess.html
(多謝Jim兄的referral)
聯合國的冰川融化報告，是建基於'投機'
UN report on glaciers melting is based on 'speculation'An official prediction by the United Nations that the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035 may be withdrawn after it was found to be based on speculation rather than scientific evidence.
一份聯合國的官方預測，喜馬拉雅冰川將約在2035年融化，在發現是建基於猜測多於科學證據後，可能要被撤回。
By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
Published: 3:00PM GMT 17 Jan 2010

Two years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made the claim which it said was based on detailed research into the impact of global warming.
But the IPCC have since admitted it was based on a report written in a science journal and even the scientist who was the subject of the original story admits it was not based on fact.

The article, in the New Scientist, was not even based on a research paper - it evolved from a short telephone interview with the academic.
Dr Syed Hasnain, an Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, said that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research.

Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said he would recommend that the claim about glaciers be dropped.

The IPCC's reliance on Hasnain's 1999 interview has been highlighted by Fred Pearce, the journalist who carried out the original interview.

Mr Pearce said he rang Hasnain in India in 1999 after spotting his claims in an Indian magazine.

He said that Dr Hasnain made the assertion about 2035 but admitted it was campaigning report rather than an academic paper that was reviewed by a panel of expert peers.

Despite this it rapidly became a key source for the IPCC when Prof 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 per cent.

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 two to three feet a year and most are far lower.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/7011713/UN-report-on-glaciers-melting-is-based-on-speculation.html
Disc:
http://www5.uwants.com/viewthread.php?tid=9295686&page=1&extra=page%3D1#pid133253361

聯合國氣候組織在喜馬拉雅冰川上承認'錯誤'
UN climate body admits 'mistake' on Himalayan glaciers
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website
Page last updated at 18:10 GMT, Tuesday, 19 January 2010
Neither satellites nor ground observations give a complete picture
The vice-chairman of the UN's climate science panel has admitted it made a mistake in asserting that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) included the date in its 2007 assessment of climate impacts.

A number of scientists have recently disputed the 2035 figure, and Jean-Pascal van Ypersele told BBC News that it was an error and would be reviewed.

But he said it did not change the broad picture of man-made climate change.

The issue, which BBC News first reported on 05 December, has reverberated around climate websites in recent days.
Some commentators maintain that taken together with the contents of e-mails stolen last year from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, it undermines the credibility of climate science.

Dr van Ypersele said this was not the case.

"I don't see how one mistake in a 3,000-page report can damage the credibility of the overall report," he said.

"Some people will attempt to use it to damage the credibility of the IPCC; but if we can uncover it, and explain it and change it, it should strengthen the IPCC's credibility, showing that we are ready to learn from our mistakes."

Grey area
The claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 appears to have originated in a 1999 interview with Indian glaciologist Syed Hasnain, published in New Scientist magazine.

The figure then surfaced in a 2005 report by environmental group WWF - a report that is cited in the IPCC's 2007 assessment, known as AR4.
An alternative genesis lies in the misreading of a 1996 study that gave the date as 2350.

AR 4 asserted: "Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world... the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high."

Dr van Ypersele said the episode meant that the panel's reviewing procedures would have to be tightened.

Slow reaction?

The row erupted in India late last year in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate summit, with opposing factions in the government giving radically different narratives of what was happening to Himalayan ice.
In December, it emerged that four leading glaciologists had prepared a letter for publication in the journal Science arguing that a complete melt by 2035 was physically impossible.

"You just can't accomplish it," Jeffrey Kargel from the University of Arizona told BBC News at the time.
"If you think about the thicknesses of the ice - 200-300m thicknesses, in some cases up to 400m thick - and if you're losing ice at the rate of a metre a year, or let's say double it to two metres a year, you're not going to get rid of 200m of ice in a quarter of a century."

The row continues in India, with Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh calling this week for the IPCC to explain "how it reached the 2035 figure, which created such a scare".

Meanwhile, in an interview with the news agency AFP, Georg Kaser from the University of Innsbruck in Austria - who led a different portion of the AR4 process - said he had warned that the 2035 figure was wrong in 2006, before AR4's publication.

"It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing," he told AFP in an interview.

He said that people working on the Asia chapter "did not react".
He suggested that some of the IPCC's working practices should be revised by the time work begins on its next landmark report, due in 2013.
But its overall conclusion that global warming is "unequivocal" remains beyond reproach, he said.Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8468358.stm

多謝Jim兄再次提供：


專家：聯合國冰川消失預測嚴重偏離事實
(法新社)2010年1月19日 星期二 20:20
（法新社巴黎18日電） 一位頂尖科學家今天說，他2006年即曾警告，有關喜瑪拉雅冰川災難式消失的預測嚴重錯誤。但這份報告數月後還是由曾獲諾貝爾獎的聯合國「政府間氣候變遷問題小組」（IPCC）出版。

IPCC2007年出版的報告指出，如果全球暖化趨勢持續，為亞洲各地逾10億人口提供水源的冰川，「非常有可能」在2035年前消失。

奧地利「茵士布魯克大學」（InnsbruckUniversity）熱帶冰河學家卡瑟（Georg Kaser）說，「這個數字不是只有一丁點錯誤，而是規模完全不符比例。」

他在一次專訪中對法新社（AFP）表示，「它實在是錯到根本不值得討論。」

英國「星期泰晤士報」（Sunday Times）率先對喜瑪拉雅冰川在2035年前會消失的報告提出質疑，並在報導中提到，這個年代的推論依據來自1999年刊出的一則新聞報導，但並沒有受到IPCC的檢驗。

卡瑟認為，錯誤的成因來自誤解1996年一份俄羅斯研究，或將在部分冰川的發現錯誤引伸為整個區域。

他指出，不論是哪一個原因，由於這個錯誤已進入報告，並成為氣候會談的依據，顯示IPCC有必要改革收集和檢驗資料的方法。

他說，以此案例而言，「整個審查制度都出了問題。」（譯者：中央社羅苑韶

http://hk.news.yahoo.com/article/100119/8/g74x.html

氣候專家反駁戈爾北極冰雪融化論 (國際)
2009-12-15 (15:42)

REUTERS

一直致力對抗全球暖化的美國前總統戈爾，在哥本哈根聯合國氣候變化大會發表報告指出，由於全球暖化危機加劇，北極的冰蓋最快會在5年內融化，也就是到了2014年夏天，北極便完全沒有冰雪覆蓋。不過，戈爾仗賴提供數據的一位氣候專家卻反駁稱，他從來沒有作出如此確切的估計，令戈爾十分尷尬。

　戈爾兩年前憑一手策劃的電影《絕望真相》（An Inconvenient Truth）獲得奧斯卡最佳紀錄片和最佳電影原創歌曲兩個獎項，環保鬥士形象深入民心。他今次出席氣候大會，發表上述最新研究報告，備受矚目。

　他在大會上引述加州蒙特雷海軍研究院氣候專家馬斯諾夫斯基（Wieslaw Maslowski）的電腦模擬報告，指北極冰蓋消失的時間，將比美國之前預期的還要早。美國當局之前是預估北極冰蓋將在2030年消失，但戈爾的發表的研究結果則指消失的時間將提早16年，換言之5年內北極夏天會變成完全沒有冰雪的世界。

　戈爾說：「這些數據是最新的，馬斯諾夫斯基獲取的推算資料顯示，有七成半機會在5至7年內，北極持續數月的夏季將完全沒有冰雪覆蓋。」

但一直受到戈爾推崇的馬斯諾夫斯基卻向戈爾投下一枚「冰雪炸彈」，聲稱不知道這些推算數據從何而來。

馬斯諾夫斯基說：「我從來不會嘗試作出如此確切的估計。」

戈爾的辦公室事後承認，這個七成半機會的數據，只是馬斯諾夫斯基數年前和戈爾交談時作出的粗略估計。

今次錯誤引述數據事件令戈爾尷尬萬分，也令到氣候大會蒙上另一層陰霾。

http://www.singtao.com/breakingnews/20091215b142640.asp

行業說客在“科學”的背後：IPCC新聞稿中的宣稱