The Khumbu Glacier, one of the longest glaciers in the world, in the Everest-Khumbu region about 140 km northeast of Kathmandu. The Himalayan glaciers provide water for more than a billion people in Asia, but experts are divided over their future.
Credit: AFP
PARIS: The U.N.'s panel of climate scientists said they will investigate claims its own doomsday prediction for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is mistaken.
In 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that glaciers in the Himalayas were receding faster than in any other part of the world and could "disappear altogether by 2035 if not sooner".
At the weekend, Britain's Sunday Times newspaper reported that this reference came from the green campaign group WWF, which in turn took it from a magazine interview given by an Indian glaciologist in 1999.
'Climategate' embarrassment continues
There is no evidence that the claim was published in a peer-reviewed journal, a cornerstone of scientific credibility, it said.
"We are looking into the issue of the Himalayan glaciers, and will take a position on it in the next two or three days," the IPCC's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri said.
The Sunday Times reported that the IPCC was likely to retract the figure, which would be a humiliation and a further boost for climate sceptics after a scandal last month dubbed 'climategate'.
Emails from scientists at Britain's University of East Anglia, a top centre for climate research, were leaked and seized on by sceptics last month as evidence that experts twisted data in order to dramatise global warming.
Some of the thousands of messages expressed frustration at the scientists' inability to explain what they described as a temporary slowdown in warming.
"Not just a little bit wrong"
A leading glaciologist who contributed to the Fourth Assessment Report described the mistake as huge and said he had notified his colleagues of it in late 2006, months before publication.
Loss of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 would take two or three times the highest expected rate of global warming, said Georg Kaser of the Geography Institute at Austria's University of Innsbruck.
"This number is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of magnitude. It is as wrong as can be wrong.
"To get this outcome, you would have to increase the ablation [ice loss] by 20 fold. You would have to raise temperatures by at least 12 degrees [Celsius]."
"It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing ... I pointed it out."
Asked why his warning had not been heeded, Kaser pointed to "a kind of amateurism" among experts from the region who were in charge of the chapter on climate impacts, where the reference appeared.
"They might have been good hydrologists or botanists, but they were without any knowledge in glaciology," he said.
