The IPCC report blunders Himalayan glacier facts

Whether this was a typo or not is apparently a matter of opinion. Much more meaningful, it seems to me, would be to read the scientific literature on glacier studies in the Himalayas and elsewhere. Anyone interested in that might start with:

World Glacier Monitoring Service

or

http://etienne.berthier.free.fr/download/Berthier_et_al_RSE_2007.pdf

as one particular example (and perhaps related to the source of 2350).

Pielke's climatesci discussions shed light on many local processes that can influence glacial mass balance. As is often the case, these are complicated systems and additional studies will help.

"Debating" 2350/2035 might not help nearly as much.

Glaciers inform climatology not just from their size changes but also because of the "paleo" chemical records they store. In this sense, the melting of any glacier reduces what we can learn about earth climate history. This is why Lonnie Thompson and colleagues have been is such a hurry to get cores while they still exist.

 

This thread is spiraling out of control and should be closed by a moderator before the warmists have to endure any undue embarrassment.

The unravelling will continue, the house of cards is falling, more investigations will ensue. Catastrophic AGW as a theory takes daily hits it can no longer withstand. The end is near. CO2 is vinicated in all but the minds of the True Believers.

On to the next catastrophic scenario. All these scammers will have to continue to find funding. On to plastics, methane, nitrous oxide - a new villain to keep the ignorant in thrall. By God, we've got to save the world from something and man has got to be at fault. If we can't control mankind, what hope is there?

If it weren't so pathetically sad, it would be funny. Ha.

 

The next thing will be excessive methane from livestock flatulence will kill us all. We must all become vegans LOL

 

I've been on this earth living in this city for 48 years.

 

AlGore and his group are starting a CowFart Credit Exchange to save the earth.

 

Back to the topic at hand.

The IPCC (The Nobel Prize-winning IPCC) touts itself as a scientific body. Now we see it includes in its 'findings' information presented as scientific fact that results from 'studies' conducted by WWF - an advocacy group! Is this information on glacial retreat the only stuff included in the latest IPCC report?

Apparently NOT!

All told, an extensive list of documents created or co-authored by the WWF is cited by this Nobel-winning IPCC report:


There is No Frakking "Scientific Consensus" on Global Warming: More Dodgy Citations in the Nobel-Winning IPCC Report

• Allianz and World Wildlife Fund, 2006: Climate change and the financial sector: an agenda for action, 59 pp. [Accessed 03.05.07: WWF UK - for a living planet filelibrary/pdf/allianz_rep_0605.pdf]
• Austin, G., A. Williams, G. Morris, R. Spalding-Feche, and R. Worthington, 2003: Employment potential of renewable energy in South Africa. Earthlife Africa, Johannesburg and World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Denmark, November, 104 pp.
• Baker, T., 2005: Vulnerability Assessment of the North-East Atlantic Shelf Marine Ecoregion to Climate Change, Workshop Project Report, WWF, Godalming, Surrey,79 pp.
• Coleman, T., O. Hoegh-Guldberg, D. Karoly, I. Lowe, T. McMichael, C.D. Mitchell, G.I. Pearman, P. Scaife and J. Reynolds, 2004:Climate Change: Solutions for Australia. Australian Climate Group, 35 pp. wwf.org.au/ publications/acg_solutions.pdf
• Dlugolecki, A. and S. Lafeld, 2005: Climate change - agenda for action: the financial sector’s perspective. Allianz Group and WWF, Munich
• Fritsche, U.R., K. Hünecke, A. Hermann, F. Schulze, and K. Wiegmann, 2006: Sustainability standards for bioenergy. Öko-Institut e.V., Darmstadt, WWF Germany, Frankfurt am Main, November
• Giannakopoulos, C., M. Bindi, M. Moriondo, P. LeSager and T. Tin, 2005: Climate Change Impacts in the Mediterranean Resulting from a 2oC Global Temperature Rise. WWF report, Gland Switzerland. Accessed 01.10.2006 at http://assets.panda.org/downloads/medreportfinal8july05.pdf.

• Hansen, L.J., J.L. Biringer and J.R. Hoffmann, 2003: Buying Time: A User’s Manual for Building Resistance and Resilience to Climate Change in Natural Systems. WWF Climate Change Program, Berlin, 246 pp.
• WWF - WWFabout_wwf/what_we_do/climate_change/our_solutions/business_industry/climate_savers/ index.cfm
• Lechtenbohmer, S., V. Grimm, D. Mitze, S. Thomas, M. Wissner, 2005:Target 2020: Policies and measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the EU. WWF European Policy Office, Wuppertal
• Malcolm, J.R., C. Liu, L. Miller, T. Allnut and L. Hansen, Eds., 2002a: Habitats at Risk: Global Warming and Species Loss in Globally Significant Terrestrial Ecosystems. WWF World Wide Fund for Nature, Gland, 40 pp.
• Rowell, A. and P.F. Moore, 2000:Global Review of Forest Fires. WWF/IUCN, Gland, Switzerland, 66 pp. http://www.iucn.org/themes/fcp/publications /files/global_review_forest_fires.pdf

• WWF, 2004: Deforestation threatens the cradle of reef diversity. World Wide Fund for Nature, 2 December 2004. Welcome to WWF's global network
• WWF, 2004: Living Planet Report 2004. WWF- World Wide Fund for Nature (formerly World Wildlife Fund), Gland, Switzerland, 44 pp.
• WWF (World Wildlife Fund), 2005: An overview of glaciers, glacier retreat, and subsequent impacts in Nepal, India and China. World Wildlife Fund, Nepal Programme, 79 pp.

• Zarsky, L. and K. Gallagher, 2003: Searching for the Holy Grail? Making FDI Work for Sustainable Development. Analytical Paper, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Switzerland

And these are from just WWF. Other advocacy groups are cited as well. As they say, read it all.

WEAVING TANGLED WEBS.

 

Following this logic I guess you had better throw out some of the data you have posted in other posts.

This is in reference to a thread you started about the IPCC emails. The paper was sponsored by SPPI who apparently shares office space with Center for Science and Public Policy, who are funded by big oil.

Source: desmogblog.org

For what it's worth, I do believe that climate change is a normal natural cyclical thing, however, I also believe that mankind also has an effect. I do not know how significant the effect we are having in the overall picture, but I am convinced whatever it is, it's not for the better.

 

After reading this:

http://web.hwr.arizona.edu/~gleonard/2009Dec-FallAGU-Soot-PressConference-Backgrounder-Kargel.pdf

I felt I had a reasonable handle on glacial mass balance in general and what we know about the Himalayan ones in particular. Kargel et al. are not particularly 'kind' to NASA and IPCC. I think they do a good job of making sure the knowledge does not get lost amid the noise.

 

Bless you for being a voice of reason. I'd been looking, but all I'd been able to deke out so far is that this is complex. No surprise, given the variety of opinions already expressed, and by itself not helpful.

To me, this had the feeling of an issue that someone with firsthand knowledge could introduce a typology to make sense of it, but that simplistic statements were just going to add to the confusion.

And, sure enough, in this presentation, looking at the geographic variation, the distinctions among types of glaciers, and the variety of mechanisms that affect glacial mass balance, that tells me this is complex. Yet with some clear patterns. So there's small-area variation (geographic clustering) and (if I read this right) there's some similarity of response within type of glacier. And, as you note, the overall mass balance trend appears clear.

On a lighter note, I have the utmost respect for people who can take PowerPoint -- a product designed to force you to talk in little squibbles of words -- and actually manage to cram enough words on a slide so that it accurately reflects the complexity of the issue they are trying to describe.

I can see where these guys and the NASA satellite guys might be like oil and water. Although the NASA press release, at least, appears to give full credit to the complexity of the issue and the geographic variation (dependence on local factors).

The NASA press release referenced in this presentation has another surprise, at least for me. The black carbon effect here appears quite different from the black carbon effect in the arctic. Here, it's the deposition of carbon at lower altitudes that leads to upslope warm air. The lower mountain sides act like a dust filter, capturing particulates, and it's that effect that induces the warming.

(Further aside: The most recent Make magazine has an article ("Snow Science") by a guy who used snows to track dust releases. A guy, sure -- it's by Forrest Mims III. It's a nice on-the-ground read of the issue. Yep, Asian dust storms and fires can, in fact, color the snow in Arizona, visible to the naked eye, and verified by microscopic examination. By an amateur. So, yeah, I get that large-scale release of particulates matters. I'm just trying to figure out what that means to me.)

If I had to have a takeaway from that, it's that we produce a lot of "dust" broadly defined, and wherever the dust settles, that can affect things. So, places that are normally white-white, or places that naturally trap craploads of dust, those are going to be affected by industrial-scale emission of particulates.

I'm perseverating on black carbon because I heat mainly with wood. Two years back, I put in modern woodstove to avoid using fossil fuel. But when I do the calculations, my grams of carbon per BTU of heat is similar to the world average (total black carbon relative to total C02). So I'm using biomass but I'm sooty, in fact, as sooty as the world industrial average. Am I coming ahead with that? Looking at the NASA GISS forcing diagrams for various forcings, black carbon matters quite a bit. Not clear from a simple calculation of the tradeoff. So I have to question whether that was a smart thing to do. I think I'm OK -- I'm in Virginia, most of my soot ought to land in the Atlantic from the prevailing NW winds. I think. But maybe not as beneficial as I originally thought.

Back on point. Thanks, I hadn't seen that, and it really helped my understanding of the issues.

 

I hesitate to do this, but ... that statement is wrong.

Annex 2 (the end) of this IPCC document lays out the circumstances and rules for use of non-peer-reviewed information in IPCC reports.

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/ipcc-principles/ipcc-principles-appendix-a.pdf

I won't even try to explain the nuance here. But this has been discussed extensively by sources that I assume you'd be familiar with, e.g., Pielke Jr., here:

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Peer Review in the IPCC

To clarify, let me quote Pielke Jr.'s first four paragraphs:

-----------
The IPCC has long expressed a strong preference for relying on peer-reviewed scientific literature in its reports (PDF) :

"Contributions should be supported as far as possible with references from the peer-reviewed and internationally available literature, and with copies of any unpublished material cited."​

However, the IPCC has evolved such that it increasingly relies on "grey literature" in its reports. Its guidelines (PDF) explain the need for additional procedures to handle grey literature:

"Because it is increasingly apparent that materials relevant to IPCC Reports, in particular, information about the experience and practice of the private sector in mitigation and adaptation activities, are found in sources that have not been published or peer-reviewed (e.g., industry journals, internal organisational publications, non-peer reviewed reports or working papers of research institutions, proceedings of workshops etc) the following additional procedures are provided."


​

------------

He then goes on to describe the procedures and (correctly) criticize IPCC for screwing up in this case.

My predictions:

One, better than even odds that the IPCC will not allow this in the next round of reports.

Two, I'd guess 10:1 or better than you'll now use this to attack somebody or something, and completely bypass that one subtle step that is critical to good discussion.