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Himalayan glaciers: there’s a mouse in the room
This blog is going to be a little bit different, because I need to let off steam about Himalayan glaciers, addressing myself mainly to readers, if any, who don’t believe in global warming.
Ben Santer is a climatologist who has done much more than most to advance our understanding of human influence on the climate. In his words from the IPCC’s Second Assessment, published in 1995, “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate.” Advances since 1995 are encapsulated in the words of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment, published in 2007: “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”
In a press conference call last week, Santer asserted that it would be wrong to use the mouse to cast doubt on the elephant. He was reacting to recent excitement in the media about Himalayan glaciers. Himalayan glaciers are the mouse in the room. Denialists evidently have no interest in the fact that sustained dispassionate study of the Earth and its atmosphere shows unequivocally, as summarized in the IPCC’s periodical assessments, that there is also an elephant in the room.
Santer is absolutely right about both the elephant and the mouse. I, however, want to focus on the mouse.
I am the guy who found the typo. That is, I found the sources of the mistaken claim, made in the second volume (section 10.6.2) of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment, that Himalayan glaciers are very likely to disappear by 2035 or perhaps sooner. I am also the guy who tipped off Fred Pearce, the author of the 1999 news story in New Scientist that is the de-facto source of the mistaken claim. Pearce’s story in last week’s New Scientist (16 January) is the spark that ignited the present firestorm threatening the IPCC in general and its chair, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, in particular. I am also the guy who, with three fellow glaciologists, wrote to Science describing the nature of the Himalayan errors.
Finally, I am a guy who like several thousand other scientists holds a tiny share of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace along with Dr Pachauri. That is, I contributed to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment.
Rating the news stories on clarity and factual accuracy, the widespread media coverage of the Himalayan mistake has ranged from not very good to very good indeed. On the whole, except for some misattributions and for their addiction to sound bites, I have no substantial fault to find with the journalists. But many of the online news outlets invite comments from readers. With rare exceptions, those comments make unutterably dismal reading.
No scientist can fault members of the public for not being experts. On big questions that are also complicated, they have to trust somebody. Any failure of trust must be painful. But that does not excuse illogic, ignorance and failure to check facts.
The most illogical of the comments on Himalayan-glacier stories last week are those that take the part for the whole. Those commenters who dismiss the entire Fourth Assessment should read the part of it (section 4.5 of the first volume) to which I contributed. If they find anything wrong with it (which I doubt) they should let me know and I will try to fix it. Pachauri is dead right when he says that the Himalayan mistake was a collective failure. We could have fixed section 10.6.2 of the second volume, but failed to because the right mechanisms for making 3000 pages of text all consistent with one another were not in place. We have to do better next time.
Ignorance is unpardonable, or at least very risky, if you feel inclined to shoot your mouth off. Speech is free, but if you want to be taken seriously you need to know your stuff. One point on which many of the newspaper readers are ignorant has to do with money. I don’t know how many salaried persons work for IPCC. But none of the contributing authors are paid, up at least as high as the level of Chapter Lead Author. The unknown colleague who wrote the mistaken paragraph about Himalayan glaciers was not paid to do so. I got nothing for the couple of hundred hours I put in on my contribution to the Fourth Assessment, or for tracking down the typo. I do get a salary, but it is for being a university professor. Contributing to IPCC assessments is not what they pay me for.
Failure to check facts is a tough one for an IPCC contributor to tackle, given that we are talking about a failure of IPCC to check its facts. But the difference is that we have to take the consequences and the irresponsible commentator doesn’t.
If you write that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is “widely accepted as being about 350 parts per million”, and walk away, it doesn’t do much good for me to answer that it is known with high confidence to be between 385 and 390 parts per million (in 2009, on a global annual average). If you write that the hockey-stick graph “has been discredited”, you have a good chance of getting away with it, but that doesn’t stop it being a wrong fact. Every objection to the hockey-stick graph, and there have been some plausible ones, has been unpicked, found to have no scientific basis, and explained. If you write that “Latest sea level measurements from benchmark island shows sea level is dropping”, you need to be told, if you are still there, that that is rubbish. I don’t know what “benchmark island” means, but the current best estimate of the rate of sea-level rise, averaged over the world during 2003 to 2008, is +2.5 millimetres/yr, give or take 0.4 mm. (I suspect it might be on the low side, but that is another story.)
You may have noticed that there is nothing about Himalayan glaciers in the last paragraph. That is because there is nothing about Himalayan glaciers in the readers’ comments. Although they should be, they aren’t interested in Himalayan glaciers.
Probably the least excusable of the failings of the denialist commentators, however, is muddle-headedness. Many of the opinions they express are actually about the levying and spending of tax, and are opinions to which as taxpayers they are clearly entitled. But you need a clear head to grasp that opinions about tax are not a warrant for any opinion whatsoever about Himalayan glaciers or the findings (as opposed to the funding) of the IPCC.
Few as they are, the real facts about Himalayan glaciers are disturbing enough that there is no need, or justification of course, for exaggerating them. Allowing for undersampling, measurement uncertainty and all the other things that make scientific pronouncements fuzzy, Himalayan glaciers are indeed losing mass, and it is more likely than not that they are losing mass faster now than a few decades ago.
When you make a scientific pronouncement about the future, you add new dimensions of fuzziness. Still, it is easy to show on the back of an envelope that there is no chance at all of Himalayan glaciers being gone by 2035. There is no plausible scenario, even with plausible exaggeration of human interference with the climate, that would deliver the energy required to melt the Himalayan ice in the time available. But Himalayan ice is a non-renewable resource. The more of it we pour into the ocean, the less our stock of fresh water, the less our chance of keeping life bearable for the people of the Indian subcontinent, and the less our chance of keeping sea-level rise within reasonable bounds.
Your options as a denialist are limited. You can elect legislators who have accepted the IPCC’s findings and will use tax as an instrument for encouraging people to get to work more cheaply. Or you can allow them to use the law, making it an offence to drive to work. Or you can continue to refuse to accept the presence of the elephant in the room, seizing on mice as an excuse. Sooner or later the market will make driving to work too expensive for you, although that will be among the least of your worries. Pick the least unpalatable option.
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