Saturday, January 23, 2010

Incorrect, Alarmist Claim About Glacial Melting

"The idea that the Himalaya could lose its glaciers by 2035—glaciers which feed rivers across South and East Asia—is a dramatic and apocalyptic one. After the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said such an outcome was very likely in the assessment of the state of climate science that it made in 2007, onlookers (including this newspaper) repeated the claim with alarm. In fact, there is no reason to believe it to be true."

That's the start of a new article in The Economist magazine, which traces how this apparently baseless, hyperventilating claim about impending climate change made its way, unchallenged, from an obscure Indian magazine called Down To Earth to a publication issued by the United Nations' panel on climate change. And it gets better, the 'research' discussed in that Indian magazine was looking at the prospects for the year 2350, not 2035. 

This article also marks the first time I have very heard the term 'grey literature.' In contrast to peer-reviewed work, 'grey literature' apparently connotes work "by governments or other organizations that are not commercially or academically published."  The IPCC apparently bases its "expert assessments" in part on this 'grey literature.'  You can read the entire article, detailing the whole sorry saga of bureaucratic incompetence and intellectual laziness HERE.

No comments:

Post a Comment