Quote:
Originally Posted by spence
Wow, you just went plaid on the lameometer.
Is it three yet?
-spence
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you've really been saying some odd things lately...
This story is getting huge play in Great Britain - not so much here in America.
David Rose of the Daily Mail pens this piece:
The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035
last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.
Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.
In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report's chapter on Asia, said: ‘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.
‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.'
It turns out that the prediction about Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035 was based on two interviews with an obscure Indian scientist and a piece in World Wildlife Federation's magazine - that botched the math in figuring glacier shrinkage:
The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres - the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121.
Money quote from the article: "
In fact, the 2035 melting date seems to have been plucked from thin air."