Wente: The great global warming collapse (2)
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.
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Related:
Corcoran: If the IPCC were Toyota
Notes:
I think Margaret has rounded this story up quite nicely but it’s far from being in depth. For that a book is required.
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Male, retired and the rest is of little interest to anyone. The site keeps me busy and if it helps others to stay abreast of daily events then my time is well spent.
jema54 Says:
A few months late and uneducated in details – what wizard this gal pretends to be! All she needed to do is cut and paste, from blogs like this , to have written herself a credible commendable article.
Posted on February 6th, 2010 at 5:12 pm
D.C. Says:
Margaret Wente Has written about something we all have known about for some time. Perhaps the enormousness of the climate scandal is beginning to sink in. It looks as though jumping off the band wagon would be better now than before it runs over the cliff.
Posted on February 7th, 2010 at 11:07 am