The melting of Himalayan glaciers – and the IPP’s so-called “2035 error” – is a hot issue right now.
Towards the end of last year, I attended a press conference on the melting of the Himalayan glaciers at the American Geophysical Meeting. It was a press conference like any other – a non-descript, high-ceilinged room, a panel of scientists, some slides with charts and bullet-points, along with an assembled crew of journalists. The scientists spoke about the effects of black carbon, or soot, on the glaciers, and I thought it was some pretty compelling stuff.
A few weeks later, the melting Himalayan glaciers hit the news in a big way – but no one was talking about soot. It was revealed in a letter to the journal Science that the IPCC was gravely mistaken on its statement that “the likelihood of [the Himalayan glaciers] disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.” A team of glaciologists had traced that estimate back to an unconfirmed story in New Scientist, and flatly called it “wrong.” The glaciers are still melting, but not at that extremely rapid rate.
The rest is (recent) history, and the mistake has provided a foundation to shake public confidence in the 2007 IPCC report, which is intended to serve as a kind of Bible for climate science.
Recently, I called up Jeffrey Kargel, a hydrologist at the University of Arizona, who was on the AGU panel. He had written a fairly comprehensive backgrounder for the press conference, asserting that the media event would “reproduce and reinforce” some of the errors causing confusion about the state of Himalayan glaciers. Kargel was also an author on the letter to Science, which broke the story to mainstream media.
As Kargel tells it, he did not ask for this particular role. “I had nothing to do with the IPCC,” he told me. “Someone screwed up and you don’t know what to do about it.”
Kargel said he noticed the 2035 error glaring from the page the first time he read the document. Many of his colleagues noticed it as well, he said, but unfortunately not soon enough to stop it from going to print. “It was a comedy of errors in one paragraph, in a document that otherwise did well to address the state of Himalayan glaciers,” he said. Kargel described the reaction of glaciologists to the 2035 disappearance date as a collective eye-roll.
The Himalayan glaciers are melting, Kargel said, but they are doing so at different rates, and responding differently to climate change in different regions. It’s deeply complex, and there is much that scientists still don’t understand. However, they did know that 2035 was patently wrong, and made no significant effort to correct the mistake until now.
I asked Kargel why this wasn’t reported, as he described that it was impossible to talk to any journalist post-IPCC without them asking about 2035. “We would say, ‘That’s not right’ and not elaborate,” he said. “This was the case until I came eyeball-to-eyeball with 2035. It’s not that I wanted to avoid talking about it, it was just so wrong it wasn’t worth discussing.”
The eyeball-to-eyeball event he’s referring to was a paper by an Indian scientist named V.K. Raina, that was reported on in the journal Science. A Science reporter called Kargel to comment on the study. Kargel read it, and found an error which he thought was on the same scale as the IPCC’s 2035 error. In the last three paragraphs of the study, Kargel said, without any scientific support, Raina claimed that the glaciers are responding on a 50,000 – 60,000 year basis.
“It was a strange balancing act,” said Kargel. “Raina cast doubt on 2035, which I knew was wrong. But Raina committed a big error in saying glaciers don’t respond to a human time scale.”
This put Kargel in a position where he felt he had to correct Raina’s study. Meanwhile, Kargel’s colleague, Graham Cogley, had tracked down the unreliable source of the 2035 error. “We are honor bound not to hide error under a bushel basket,” Kargel told me. “We had no choice but to go forward” with the public correction on both Raina’s study and the IPCC.
Kargel and Cogley assembled a team of glaciologists to set the record straight on the science. Four wrote the letter to Science (which the journal waited a few months to publish) and 17 put together the backgrounder for the AGU press conference.
Kargel expressed feelings of anger and frustration about the reaction to the 2035 correction. He said he had read blogs and comments about it. “I know people who put decent, hard work, their souls and minds into [the IPCC report]. It’s heartbreaking to see so many people getting into conspiracy thinking,” he said. “All we wanted was to get the IPCC to take corrective action.”
Indeed, climate skeptics have taken the 2035 mistake, coming on the heels of the hacked “Climategate” emails, to indicate that the entire IPCC, and by relation, the entirety of climate science, is faulty. But Kargel, and many other scientists say it proves nothing, other than a flawed review process on that paragraph – and possibly other sections of the document. “How could you have so many thousands of pages and not have errors?” Kargel asked rhetorically. He went on, “Scientists have to be more proactive. How can it be that one error can castigate an entire organization?”
Science is an evolving process. Knowledge is constantly being sought, and errors are always being found. Kargel and his colleagues continue to try and understand how the Himalayan glaciers are reacting to climate change – and how that will impact the billion people who rely upon them. Kargel told me he is confident that the next IPCC assessment will be a much stronger document, drawing on the lessons learned from the IPCC’s mistakes about the Himalayan glaciers.
One of my colleagues pointed out something in the article that needs a comment; and I should also shine a light on a very poor word choice of mine (we all make stupid errors). In the article, it says that I asserted that the NASA press activity at last Fall\’s AGU \”would reproduce and reinforce\” [the 2035 error]. As it turned out, NASA was very responsive to issues I raised, and their press activity focused on the new science (intriguing indications that particulate air pollution–largely soot and smog; also mineral dust– can and does affect Himalayan and Tibetan climate); NASA, as it turned out, did not reproduce or reinforce the 2035 error. In fact, the press interaction gave an opportunity to help remedy the IPCC\’s citation of faulty ideas. OK, now my error: I used a poor word choice in the interview. The \”Bible\” analogy was a phrasing I used, and I should not have. First, for the believers in the Bible as God\’s direct words, obviously the IPCC reports are nothing like that; they are science: falsifiable work of observations and logic, using the most advanced observing and computing systems and some of the best intellectual power among our planet\’s 6 billion people. It is not God-given, and it is not taken by scientists as a matter of faith, but as a source of insight and data and knowledge upon which further work can be based, or which can be supplanted as better information is obtained. Like other scientific reports, the Fourth Assessment\’s data, methods, and conclusions are falsifiable, meaning confirmable and verifiable, or able to be proven wrong if it is wrong or modified if needing amendment. (Readers be wary: there are alternate and some incorrect word definitions out there; I give you mine here.) And so, in that bit of history now so well documented and still as incredible as the day it was tracked down, \”2035\” crept in the the Fourth Assessment, where it didn\’t belong. And the scientific system found it to be errant and reported it as errant; it was not the smooth process we normally undertake, but the fact is, science is self correcting. There is nothing \”Biblical\” about it. My poor word usage. Sorry.
This article does justice to part of the story behind the story of why I and my colleagues investigated and reported the 2035 error. I am pleased that the IPCC has taken responsibility and corrective action, and I am confident that the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment will be an improvement, as each successive assessment has been. This is a natural progression of knowledge and improved recognition of what IPCC is about. I am also hopeful that the media reporting environment will be much more cautious and fact-based, and less prone to rampant repetition of things they’ve heard or read, no matter what the authority of the source. Hopefully the irresponsible or simply uninformed conspiracy blogging about “Glaciergate” and “Climategate” will diminish, because those writers do as much harm as sensationalized exaggerated reporting does; in fact, it’s the same mentality at work– just make a shocking story and forget the facts. Climate change issues and attendant matters such as glacier changes are too important–too significant for everybody– not to get the stories straight. I should make a few factual corrections to the EarthSky article. Raina’s report made an unsubstantiated and completely untenable claim that alpine glaciers in the Himalaya may respond to climate shifts occurring on timescales of 6000 to 15000 years, which for humanly significant issues in front of us means that they effectively don’t respond at all to climate change. This is of course ridiculous and conflicts with much evidence as well as well-grounded physical theory pointing to a range of much faster response times (ranging from very rapid responses to as much as possibly a couple centuries, but not longer than that.) In fact, it os physically not possible for the response times of Himalayan glaciers to be as slow as 6000 years, much less 15000 years. The current version of the backgrounder presentation, publicly available, has 17 signed authors. It is a dynamic and growing document, and authorship as well as content is gradually increasing. We will be seeking formal publication of aspects of the document. As for the article’s claim of a billion people dependent on Himalayan glaciers, there is a misunderstanding–very widely disseminated– about that as well. There are certainly over 500 million people who receive some of their water from melting Himalayan glaciers. But far fewer receive MOST of their water from the negative mass balance (gradual diminishment) of Himalayan glaciers. Many more–but not half a billion– have much of their water supplies regulated seasonally by the storage of snow and ice during the accumulation season and release of water during the ablation season; in some places, this natural regulation means that they have much more water available during the driest season than they otherwise would have.
Dr. Kargel, thank you for this clarification. May I ask a question? If the Himalayan glaciers are not expected to be gone by 2035 … when ARE they expected to be gone?
All the best,
Deborah Byrd
I was also wondering if the glaciologists have an estimate to replace 2035, or if they eschew using specific dates at all. None of the news reports has mentioned if, and when, the researchers predict the Himalayan glaciers are likely to disappear if the planet continues to warm at its current rate.
So, I read Dr. Kargel’s “backgrounder” report on glacial changes in High Asia, including the Himalayas. It’s an excellent, detailed report. If I were to summarize the main takeaway for a paragraph in a news story, I’d say that Kargel and his colleagues note that various glaciers in the High Asia region (Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan) behave differently. Glaciers are melting rapidly in some areas, such as the Eastern Himalaya; however, glaciers respond differntly to climate change in other areas of the region. Some glaciers are stagnant, some are surging in growth. In the Eastern Himalaya, observations over the past 100 years suggest that the next 100 years will involve mostly retreat.
So, some glaciers will likely retreat a lot by 2110.
Thanks Lindsay and Dr. Kargel for clarifying the record on this issue.
Dan and Deborah: Dan has it exactly right in every word mentioned; except I hesitate on the excellence of the report; it\’s just a rough stab at helping the public understand what the reality is, as best we know it; and to point out that much is not known. Yes, Himalayan glaciers for the most part will be much smaller in 2110 than they are now; but the current big ones will probably not have yet disappeared. We need to know a LOT more before we can say when they WILL disappear. And when projecting out as far as 2110 and beyond, the world depends on what carbon emissions scenario the world follows, and on all the myriad uncertainties about how climate warming and changes in precipitation will track the CO2 content of the atmosphere. It\’s a lot easier to make definitive statements about the fact that these big glaciers will still be around (some of them much changed) in 2035 than to say they will disappear by year 2XYZ.
I am a little bit puzzled about where all the climate denialists are on this site. It\’s a welcome breath of fresh air to have this particular puzzle, and to respond to people who are actually wanting to learn. Sadly, glaciologists don\’t have as many answers as we\’d like to be able to provide. I will soon update the background presentation to explain, at least partly, why it is that research has been so difficult in the Himalaya, and also why changes of even small glaciers can be very important to people; whereas some of the importance has also been exaggerated. Maybe it will be upgraded by Monday, so check back if you\’re interested.
There was no “error”. The IPCC is a part of the UN. The UN is a socialsit organization dedicated to world rule and the imposition of socialism on all humans. It is bent on this. The IPCC is a tool being used to frighten folks into compliance.
There is no AGW. The term “climate change” is the proof of that. This is about stealing your money and your sovereignty. Pure and simple.
ALweys, follow the money. Follow the “need” for power.
[...] would disappear by the 2030s. According to Jeffrey Kargel, at the University of Arizona, this statement “was just so wrong it wasn’t worth discussing.” Surely the question needs to be [...]
I hope you will keep updating your post . Thank for sharing.