I don’t see how one mistake in a 3,000-page report can damage the credibility of the overall report
So says Dr van Ypersele. I can see how. If you say all the Himalayan Glaciers will disappear by 2035 in the IPCC’s 4th annual report and the IPCC has no idea where the figure came from, it makes people wonder just how much other made up stuff is in there. The date is wildly inaccurate:
“You just can’t accomplish it,” Jeffrey Kargel from the University of Arizona told BBC News at the time.
“If you think about the thicknesses of the ice – 200-300m thicknesses, in some cases up to 400m thick – and if you’re losing ice at the rate of a metre a year, or let’s say double it to two metres a year, you’re not going to get rid of 200m of ice in a quarter of a century.”
The row continues in India, with Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh calling this week for the IPCC to explain “how it reached the 2035 figure, which created such a scare”.