[Cy Q. Faunce]

Ah, good old reliable -- makes one last reply in time for me to respond before bed. I guess your trolls take less time than making an actual argument would.

Originally Posted by HappyOldGuy

I already have. I've given their own rationale presented in private emails and proven that their perceptions were a rational view of the facts.

You haven't done the latter. All you did was prove that before they wrote those particular emails, someone they didn't like said something they didn't like. You are lying about what you have proven, just as you've lied about so many other things in this exchange.

Originally Posted by HappyOldGuy

You've given nothing. Sorry, but you can't win if you don't play.

You're a liar. You made the statement; it is up to you to prove it. Pity you can't.

You claimed a while ago that you are happy to argue openly and boldly and be judged by what you say. Apparently that doesn't work out very well for you in practice.

[danno]

UN to probe doomsday glacier forecast

The United Nations' panel of climate scientists says it will probe claims its doomsday prediction for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers was wrong, as an expert said he had warned of the mistake.

The Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is already under attack over hacked email exchanges which sceptics say reflected attempts to skew the evidence for global warming.

The new controversy focuses on a reference in the IPCC's landmark Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 that said the probability of glaciers in the Himalayas "disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high".

At the weekend, Britain's Sunday Times newspaper reported that this reference came from the green campaign group WWF, which in turn took it from an interview given by an Indian glaciologist to New Scientist magazine in 1999.

There is no evidence that the claim was published in a peer-reviewed journal, a cornerstone of scientific credibility, it said.

"We are looking into the issue of the Himalayan glaciers, and will take a position on it in the next two or three days," IPCC's chairman Rajendra Pachauri said in an email.

In an interview with AFP, a leading glaciologist who contributed to the Fourth Assessment Report described the mistake as "huge" and said he had notified his colleagues of it in late 2006, months before publication.

Loss of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 would take two or three times the highest expected rate of global warming, said Georg Kaser of the Geography Institute at Austria's University of Innsbruck.

"This number is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of magnitude. It is as wrong as can be wrong.

"To get this outcome, you would have to increase the ablation [ice loss] by 20-fold. You would have to raise temperatures by at least 12 degrees.

"It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing ... I pointed it out."

Asked why his warning had not been heeded, Dr Kaser pointed to "a kind of amateurism" among experts from the region who were in charge of the chapter on climate impacts, where the reference appeared.

"They might have been good hydrologists or botanists, but they were without any knowledge in glaciology," he said.

The Fourth Assessment Report said that the evidence for global warming was now "unequivocal," that the chief source for it was man-made, and that there were already signs of climate change, of which glacial melt was one.

The massive publication had the effect of a political thunderclap, triggering promises to curb greenhouse gases that had stoked the problem.

Dr Kaser said the core evidence of the Fourth Assessment Report remained incontrovertible.

"I am careful in saying this, because immediately people will again engage in IPCC bashing, which would be wrong," he said.

But he acknowledged that the process of peer review, scrutiny and challenge which underpin the IPCC's reputation had "entirely failed" when it came specifically to the 2035 figure.

The 2035 reference appeared in the second volume of the Fourth Assessment Report, a tome published in April 2007 that focused on the impacts of climate change, especially on human communities.

Part of the problem, said Dr Kaser, was "everyone was focused" on the first volume, published in February 2007, which detailed the physical science for climate change.

Work on this volume was "much more attractive to the community" of glaciologists, and they had failed to pick up on the mistake that appeared in the second, he said.

The question of glacial melt is a vital one for South Asia, as it touches on flooding or water stress with the potential to affect hundreds of millions of lives.

Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh has repeatedly challenged the IPCC's claims.

The IPCC came under ferocious attack from climate sceptics last month ahead of the UN conference in Copenhagen.

Emails from scientists at Britain's University of East Anglia, a top centre for climate research, were leaked and seized upon as evidence that experts twisted data in order to dramatise global warming.

Some of the thousands of messages expressed frustration at the scientists' inability to explain what they described as a temporary slowdown in warming. Dr Pachauri has vowed to investigate the affair.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2...19/2795485.htm

Scientist denies UN glacier melt date

An Indian scientist at the centre of a new climate science storm has denied saying that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 - an alarming date used by the UN's top global warming body.

Syed Hasnain, however, did acknowledge making comments suggesting that many of the glaciers could disappear by the middle of this century.

The controversy focuses on a reference by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to the probability of glaciers in the Himalayas "disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high".

In a landmark 2007 report, the IPCC sourced the date to green campaign group WWF, which in turn took the prediction from an interview given by Mr Hasnain to the New Scientist magazine in 1999.

The IPCC has said it is reviewing the figure and looks set to retract the assertion - an embarrassing climbdown and a blow to its credibility as the reliable authority on global climate science.

There is no evidence that the 2035 claim was published in a peer-reviewed journal, a cornerstone of scientific research.

Mr Hasnain issued a statement on the comments he made to the New Scientist, saying the 2035 date was "a journalistic substitution" which had been made without his knowledge or approval.

"I have not given any date or year on the likely disappearance of Himalayan glaciers - neither in any interview nor in any of my publications," he said.

However, he added that in 1999 "a scientific postulation was made that all the glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas could disappear in the next 40 to 50 years at their present rate of decline".

Mr Hasnain said he and other experts were the victims of "a concentrated campaign to denigrate scientists who have established the impact of climate change".

The Indian scientist is now a glaciologist with the New Delhi-based The Energy and Resources Institute, which is headed by IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri.

Mr Pachauri defended the Nobel-winning panel's work on Tuesday, telling reporters at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi that even if the 2035 prediction was wrong, the effects of global warming were undeniable.

"Theoretically, let's say we slipped up on one number. I don't think it takes anything away from the overwhelming scientific evidence of what's happening with the climate of this earth," he said.

Indian environment minister Jairam Ramesh, often sceptical of the link between global warming and melting glaciers, has said the IPCC panel "has to do a lot of answering on how it reached the 2035 figure".

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2...20/2797363.htm