Settling the science on Himalayan glaciers

“Every morning you have to rise and decide that it might be a good day not to die,” says John Shroder of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, who has spent decades studying the glaciers of the Karakoram and Himalayan mountains, stretching from Pakistan in the west across India and into Nepal in the east. Read the rest of this entry »

More cutting-and-pasting in glacier reports

It’s become clear that some facts in the IPCC report were pulled from a 1999 news article in the Indian popular-science magazine Down to Earth, as ClimateScienceWatch pointed out by showing striking similarities between these two documents. But I think it hasn’t been clear that the section on Himalayan glaciers started off as a chunk of text apparently build almost completely by cut-and-paste. The parts that aren’t from the Down to Earth article appear copied from a couple of other sources.

I took the IPCC’s starting text, from their First Order Draft (FOD)—before it went through two rounds of comments and revisions—and compared it with the Down to Earth news story, and with other sources I could find online. (ClimateScienceWatch, on the other hand, only looked at the IPCC’s final text.)

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Romm: IPCC should stop using grey literature

“I think the IPCC needs to stop this practice of using gray literature, especially for quantitative matters,” says climate blogger and former U.S. energy official Joe Romm, on his site Climate Progress.

The IPCC’s problems with “Glaciergate,” and the more recent nitpicking about the Andes (see my post “Why are academics citing me? I’m a journalist (part 2)”), come from seemingly uncritical use of grey literature. It’s uncritical both in the sense of not checking the facts and sources in the grey literature, and also in using grey literature where regular, peer-reviewed would probably suffice to make the point.

That’s definitely the case with both the Himalayas and the Andes. While there could be much more monitoring of both mountain ranges, it seems there’s ample information to see an effect of warming and a reason to be worried.

I’m really hoping the IPCC will be more careful on the next report, due out in 2013.

What was it that George W. Bush said? “Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

Why are academics citing me? I’m a journalist (part 2)

After digging into a research paper on the Bengal tigers that cited a news story of mine, I took a look at other academic papers that cited my news stories. A headline in the Indian newspaper The Deccan Herald says it all: “Himalayan blunder: Perils of relying on ‘grey literature’”.

So, besides the Tiger study, what other authoritative papers have cited my news stories?

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Why are academics citing me? I’m a journalist

After it turned out that a factoid in the IPCC report came from a news article (either via a WWF report, or directly), then it made me wonder what academics had cited the articles I’ve written myself. I dug up all the references I could using Google Scholar, and there were more than a dozen. Most of the papers I could get access to were citing my articles on relatively minor points.

But there was one case, at least, where a paper cited me on a fact that is both important to the findings, and is something the authors could have easily verified elsewhere.

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Dude, if you’re wrong, admit it

A post on Global Post, “The glacier show – a comedy in many parts”, goes into obsessive detail on all the instances that glaciologist Syed Hasnain told reporters that Himalayan glaciers were likely (or very likely) to disappear by 2035.

After the whole “Glaciergate” kerfuffle broke, Hasnain got a lot of attention, unsurprisingly. But apparently instead of saying he was wrong (and I haven’t seen any stories reporting that he said that), he claimed he was misquoted, according to a Bloomberg article, “Melting Himalayan Glaciers Scientist Says He Was Misquoted”:

“I have not given any date or year on the likely disappearance of Himalayan glaciers.”

“I had simply told the New Scientist in an interview that the mass of the glaciers will decline in 40 years,” Hasnain said in a telephone interview. “The date (2035) was their invention. I was misquoted in the report.”

But the “>Global Post story, digs up a bunch of instances of him using the 2035 figure—enough that it must be that reporters were quoting him correctly.

Message to Hasnain: Dude, if you’re wrong, just say so. That’s what scientists do.

The tone of the Global Post post implies that Hasnain is an alarmist who was doing this to raise money, since they say “Carnegie and EU grants are more or less in the bag.” (I haven’t looked up which grants they’re talking about.)

But I think the answer is more mundane. Scientists get attached to their pet ideas, and it takes a lot to convince them otherwise. This happens in every field. That’s why the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck said:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

In the case of the Himalayan glaciers, fortunately we don’t have to wait that long for the mistake to be corrected.

Another 2035 mention: Quaternary Science Reviews

I found another mention of the 2035 figure in a peer-reviewed paper:

Latest Pleistocene and Holocene glacier fluctuations in the Himalaya and Tibet
by Lewis A. Owen, published 2009 in Quaternary Science Reviews. It says:

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Himalayan glaciers are among fastest shrinking

One of the IPCC claims that the media and bloggers jumped on was this: “Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world“.

Not so, some news stories said. I haven’t seen much hard data yet, though, one way or the other.

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Letter to Science: Tracking the Source of Glacier Misinformation

The most authoritative examination of the sources of the IPCC’s glacier errors comes from glaciologist Graham Cogley and colleagues, in a letter to Science published last week. They’re experts in the field, and helped track down the sources of the errors and bring them to light. They’re to be applauded, since it shows that the scientific community tends to correct itself.

Cogley and colleagues don’t make any mention of an article in the Indian popular-science magazine Down to Earth, however, which seems to be the source that an IPCC author used for the mistaken information.

The clearest, most complete description of the whole sequence of events that I’ve found is “A distraction of Himalayan proportions” by Steve Connor in The Independent. (As far as I can tell, this part of the story was first exposed by the article “IPCC slips on the ice with statement about Himalayan glaciers” on ClimateScienceWatch.)

Himalayan glaciers “may never disappear,” Molnia says

Often when I’m reading about climate change, it seems like we’re doomed—and our efforts to cut emissions will only delay the inevitable, rather than stopping anything bad from happening. That’s the silver lining in the revelation that the IPCC was wrong predicting that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. If true, there’s little we could do to stop that.

So it’s good to remember that not all is lost. Efforts now can still protect crucial parts of the planet from damage.

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