Himalayan meltdown [update]

The world’s warmists are melting down. 

Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick is pucked.

“Hide the decline” is no longer just a phrase used in Phil Jones’s emails—and the world and his wife are now hip to the legerdemain of Jones’s CRU.

And the UN’s IPCC—the scientific central planning unit to whom every warmist and his wet dream make obeisance—are now exposed as desperate, if not yet dateless: New Scientist magazine exposes the IPCC’s scientific credibility as something approaching zero.  Tim Blair rounds up the story:

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.

But that news story must itself have had some rigorous science behind it, right? Wrong:

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Still, Hasnain is a scientist, so he wouldn’t have just been offering idle speculation, would he? He would:

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research.

Yet surely the IPCC had the sense to review this claim and not overplay it? They didn’t:

When finally published, the IPCC report did give its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the glaciers melting was “very high”. The IPCC defines this as having a probability of greater than 90%.

The London Times summarises: “If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research.” Which is saying something.

Hence Blair’s headline: Ice Remain, IPCC Melts

UPDATE: Poneke has a must-read post.  In real life, Poneke is (or was) one of the country’s top investigative journalists.  His post should really be gracing the pages of one of the country’s top investigative journals . . . if we had one.

Instead, here it is: 13 years of Climategate emails show tawdry manipulation of science by a powerful cabal at the heart of the global warming campaign.  Says he in introduction:

    “This is the longest and most important article I’ve yet written for this blog and I make no apology for its 4600 words — more also than in any newspaper article. As a journalist, I believe the Climategate emails have exposed one of the most significant news stories of the decade. As the mainstream news media has so far barely gone beyond giving those who wrote them and their supporters time and space to deny their undeniable contents, I present here an extensive journalistic account of what they actually say in the context of the dates and events in which they were written, with full links to all the emails.
    “Having now read all the Climategate emails, I can conclusively say they demonstrate a level of scientific chicanery of the most appalling kind that deserves the widest possible public exposure. . . ”