In 2007, the most comprehensive report to date on global warming, issued by the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a shocking claim: The Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035.
These glaciers provide the headwaters for Asia's nine largest rivers and lifelines for the more than one billion people who live downstream. Melting ice and snow would create mass flooding, followed by mass drought. The glacier story was reported around the world. Last December, a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group, warned, “The deal reached at Copenhagen will have huge ramifications for the lives of hundreds of millions of people who are already highly vulnerable due to widespread poverty.” To dramatize their country's plight, Nepal's top politicians strapped on oxygen tanks and held a cabinet meeting on Mount Everest.
But the claim was rubbish, and the world's top glaciologists knew it. It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF itself. When its background came to light on the eve of Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, shrugged it off. But now, even leading scientists and environmental groups admit the IPCC is facing a crisis of credibility that makes the Climategate affair look like small change.
University of Alabama at Huntsville has the data evidencing the drop over a ten year period. Hardly the hottest decade on record? Satellite temperature data (UAH and RSS) is more reliable because it covers the entire earth - with the exception of small regions near the north and south poles. They use the same methodology from year to year, and the two sources tend to agree fairly closely. The downside of satellite data is that it only goes back to 1978.
Now for the science of the land based readings: LONDON: The British Meteorological Office has been forced to correct its global temperature records after a science blogger discovered that Australian weather data had been misused or discarded.
The mistakes were discovered by Dr John Graham-Cumming when the temperature records were made public by the office in December in the wake of the East Anglia University email scandal.
Dr Graham-Cumming, a London mathematician and computer programmer who describes himself as a ''computer geek'', found that data from seven weather stations in Australia had been accidentally discarded while another 112 Australian stations - or 28 per cent of the Oceania total - had not been fully included in the calculations.
''What appears to have happened is that the Met Office calculated the averages and then got more data from Oceania and then failed to update the averages,'' Dr Graham-Cumming said.
''The site with the greatest error was Napier Nelson Park, in New Zealand, where the average temperature was off by more than 1 degree. That's a lot given that the total warming seen since the 1970s is less than 1 degree and for this location the Met Office had it more than 1 degree hotter than it is. Had the error I'd found been more widespread, it could have had a real effect on the overall picture.''
He said that when the office checked his findings it discovered similar problems with US weather data, with 121 stations assigned to the wrong location or overwritten in the calculations.
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