Heat Over Panel’s View of Asian Ice, Disasters

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for two decades the most important guide for the global community to the causes and consequences of the phenomenon, is facing a series of challenge over its practices, both from within and without.

The latest comes as basic flaws have been exposed in a panel finding on thawing Asian glaciers that, while buried in the back matter of the panel’s 2007 report on impacts of warming, had become a prime talking point among campaigners calling for action to curb emissions of greenhouse gases.

[UPDATE, 1/27, 4:30 p.m.: David Rose, who wrote the article on Murari Lal’s description of the Himalayan ice error, utterly rejects Dr. Lal’s charges below. His full email is appended at the bottom of this post. In sum, he said: “I reported Dr Lal’s remarks to me exactly as he made them, and as I recorded in verbatim notes at the time.]

[UPDATE, 1/27: Murari Lal, a coordinating lead author on the chapter of the climate panel report containing the errant conclusion on Himalayan glaciers, has denied saying what was attributed to him in a widely quoted British newspaper article. An email message from him is appended at the bottom of this post. In a note to the I.P.C.C. office, a copy of which was sent to The Times, he wrote:

“Dear sirs, The statement attributed to me in ‘Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn’t been verified’ By David Rose in UK Daily Mail on 24th January 2010 has been wrongly placed. I never said this story at any time and strongly condemn the writer for attributing this to me.”

Joe Romm also interviewed him earlier this week (apologies, Joe, for missing this earlier).]

[UPDATE, 1/23: New revelations about apparent mishandling by the climate panel of analysis of disasters and warming, and a rebuttal from the I.P.C.C. (pdf); UPDATE, 1/21: The panel leadership regrets the Himalayas error and is criticized over descriptions of disaster risk in its reports.]

In the body of the chapter on Asian impacts, the glacier projections were spelled out this way (in a passage dearly in need of an editor):

Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005). The receding and thinning of Himalayan glaciers can be attributed primarily to the global warming due to increase in anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases.

As a sequence of press reports have noted over the past week, it’s clear that the finding was not based on peer-reviewed research, but drawn from a 2005 report on Himalayan glaciers by the World Wildlife Fund. Where did the environmental group get the finding? From an informal comment made by an Indian scientist in an article in New Scientist magazine in 1999. (One panel contributor, Georg Kaser, has said there were warnings that this particular finding was wrong.)

Elisabeth Rosenthal has a story on the latest twists in The Times, and you can read a lot more at Roger Pielke Jr.’s blog. (He has long been critical of other aspects of the impacts analysis by the climate panel.)

The situation is particularly embarrassing for the climate panel because its chairman, Rajendra K. Pachauri, had strongly criticized the Indian government for issuing a report last November challenging the idea that the glaciers feeding its rivers and farmers are in meltdown mode. At the time, Dr. Pachauri dismissed that report as lacking peer review and scientific citations.

Now, it’s evident that one of the panel’s own conclusions on glaciers appears to have precisely the same level of authority.

At the same time, it’s clear that senior authors of the panel’s most visible products, its summaries for policymakers, had little confidence in this finding because projections of glacier impacts in Asia are far more nuanced in those infuential distillations of the full voluminous assessment.

There is ample evidence that, while the Himalayan ice is not being monitored nearly precisely enough to make such a precise projection, its major glaciers are fading fast. But there are a lot of factors involved, according to many glaciologists and climate specialists, including soot from cooking fires, which settles on ice, making it less reflective and amplifying melting. (That’s one reason there’s scant support for the second sentence in that glacier statement above, which definitively fingers greenhouse gases from humans as the main cause of the ice loss.)

On Monday, several senior authors involved in summarizing the 2007 findings on impacts of warming – Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution, Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton, and Stephen H. Schneider of Stanford* — acknowledged this was not the panel’s finest hour, but stood by the admittedly imperfect process and overarching conclusions. Dr. Field, who is leading the next impact assessment, is involved in a review of the incident along with panel leadership.

The report on impacts of climate change – one of three main sections of each of the panel’s periodic assessments — has long been seen by some climate scientists, including some participants in the I.P.C.C. process, as a relatively weak element in the overall effort, in part because it has less scientific literature to draw on.

The passage on the Asian glaciers is not alone in including internal inconsistencies or imprecision. The sections on the risks of extinction from warming in the report and the panel’s summaries are, at the very least, confusing.

In the Summary for Policy Makers of the report on climate impacts, there are different summations of extinction risk within a few pages. On page 6, the summary states:

Approximately 20 to 30 percent of plant and animal species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average temperature exceed 1.5 to 2.5°C. * N [4.4, T4.1]

In a chart on page 16, at a point marking a 2°C warming from the global average temperature through the 1980s and 1990s, a label reads:

Up to 30 percent of species at increasing risk of extinction.

In the Summary for Policy Makers of the final Synthesis Report drawing on the entire 2007 assessment, the extinction risk is summarized in yet another way (the italics are from the report):

There is medium confidence that approximately 20 to 30 percent of species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average warming exceed 1.5 to 2.5°C (relative to 1980 to 1999).

I asked a half dozen I.P.C.C. scientists about this during a side session at the Copenhagen climate talks and, in particular, asked them to decipher for me the meaning of the nested qualifiers in that final statement. Among other things, how much would extinction risk rise? Basically, they acknowledged there was inconsistency and flawed writing.

How would you translate that last passage into a clear statement on global biological unraveling from that amount of warming?

While it’s clear, from the Arctic to the tropics, that human-driven warming and other human activities can, and will, have substantial ecological impacts, projecting outright extinction remains one of the trickier enterprises in biology.

So what does all of this mean to world leaders or the public as the planet and the United States ponder substantial steps to move away from unfettered burning of fossil fuels?

The science pointing to rising risks of environmental and social disruption from an unabated rise in greenhouse gas emissions remains robust.

But the task of the volunteer climate panel looks tougher than ever. Dr. Field, who is in charge of the next impact assessment, has told me repeatedly that efforts to avoid such errors will intensify. Each cycle of the panel’s climate reviews has introduced more transparency.

Presumably more will come now.

[UPDATE, 1/27: Here’s an email from Murari Lal, a lead author on the chapter on Asia in the 2007 impacts report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

I am not a Glaciologist but a Climatologist and the statement attributed to me in “Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn’t been verified” By David Rose in UK Daily Mail on 24th January 2010 has been wrongly placed. I never said this story at any time and strongly condemn the writer for attributing this to me.

More specifically, I never said during my conversation with Rose the following statements being attributed to me:

(a) ‘it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.’

(b) ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.’

(c) ‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’, and

(d) ‘We as authors followed them to the letter,’ he said. ‘Had we received information that undermined the claim, we would have included it.’.

Contrary to the claim by Rose that “Hayley Fowler of Newcastle University, suggested that their draft did not mention that Himalayan glaciers in the Karakoram range are growing rapidly,” the Asia Chapter does include this finding under section 10.2.4.2 on page 477.

What I said was “As authors, we had to report only the best available science (inclusive of a select few grey literatures as per the rules of procedure) which is “policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral” and that’s what we collectively did while writing the Asia Chapter. None of the authors in Asia Chapter were Glaciologist and we entirely trusted the findings reported in the WWF 2005 Report and the underlying references as scientifically sound and relevant in the context of climate change impacts in the region.

Regards,

Dr. Murari Lal

1006, Osimo Bldg., Mahagun Mansion-II
1/4 Vaibhavkhand, Indirapuram
Ghaziabad – 201014
Uttar Pradesh, INDIA]

[David Rose’s email message is here:
Dear Mr Revkin,
I’ve only just become aware that you have stated in your blog that I misquoted Dr Lal in my recent Mail on Sunday article. This claim is utterly false. I reported Dr Lal’s remarks to me exactly as he made them, and as I recorded in verbatim notes at the time. Would you please amend your blog at once to take account of this. I don’t have to tell you that this is a very serious allegation to make about a fellow reporter. I am, I must say, surprised that you made no attempt to put it to me before publishing it. Dr Lal may regret what he said, but say these things he did. I would appreciate a speedy response. (For the record, I didn’t make the claim; It was made to the I.P.C.C. office by Dr. Lal.)]

[*typo fixed (StanDford) thanks to one of our “cloud” copy editors — you readers.]