UNITED NATIONS REPORT REPRODUCES MYTH ABOUT HIMALAYAN GLACIAL MELTING
The following is excerpted from “World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown,” The Times, London, Jan. 17, 2010: “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. ... 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.’”
[CONCLUDING NOTE: On January 20, the UN apologized for the misleading data by labeling it “poorly substantiated.” Actually, the data was entirely unsubstantiated, but the global warming kooks aren’t about to back away from their money-making, power-grabbing myth.]
BRITISH METEORIGICAL OFFICE PREDICTED MILD WINTER
The British Met (formerly called Meteorological) Office’s prediction for a mild winter was grossly wrong. In fact, it has been bitterly cold, with temperatures plunging to as low as -22C in places. A BBC weatherman, Paul Hudson, suggested that the Met Office’s computer simulations might have “developed a warm bias” that caused the wrong forecast. (“Met Office computer accused of ‘warm bias,’” Daily Mail, Jan. 17, 2010).
Be that as it may, one thing is certain, and that is that modern scientists cannot predict the weather three months from now, not to speak of three years or three decades. (The Met Office’s prediction of a “barbeque summer” last year was just as wrong as its winter forecast.) The “computer models” that are used to predict long-term global warming are a joke. Man, even with his vaunted modern scientific expertise, simply does not have enough knowledge to make such predictions accurately.
Pompous ignorance seasoned with a good measure of outright deception and a heaping dose of greed are the ingredients of the man-made global warming stew.