Himalayan glaciers are melting, mostly

Fri Jan 22 21:18:23 MST 2010

Dear GLIMS colleagues,
I thought I should update you on what you probably have been hearing about.  The big Himalayan "glaciergate."  I hate that term, and Climategate, because it implies some kind of conspiracy.  It was an error, or a paragraph comedy of errors, in an otherwise almost entirely very serious, very real, very accurate, very useful, encyclopedic document about our changing planet.  
If you google on cogley glacier himalaya 2035, you will come up with 7990 hits at the moment; and counting.  Our letter to the editor can be accessed here:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/326/5955/924
The formal paper publication is due in Jan 29 issue of Science.
One of many mainstream media articles is in the Economist (link below).  It is perhaps typical of the better half of the articles, in that it reports the error, is a bit incredulous (as we all are) about the error, and acknowledges the value of the remainder of the IPCC AR4 assessment, without offering much that is overly helpful to aid readers to get an idea of why the IPCC Fourth Assessment really is very much on target for the most part.  The Economist article was reasonable, under the circumstances, so long as it might be followed by other articles that focus more on what *IS* happening.   http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15328534If you look for the posted comments-- and I only got through 7 or 8 before feeling an urge to respond (I say the politely).  See my extended comment #21, reproduced below.  I don't expect that any made-up mind will be swayed, but just possibly two or three thinking brains will consider what I say.
As for why the Cogley et al. letter was needed, and why the IPCC finally retracted its statement about Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035, if this remains a mystery to you, please feel free to contact me, Graham, Kees, and Georg.  Anyway, we have documented this need in an evolving set of posts on Cryolist, and we are satisfied with the IPCC response, and encouraged that the media ruckus can move to other topics, possibly including a more realistic view of global climate change.  We will now leave Cryolist, and you, in peace about this.  But you may feel absolutely free to use our 46-slide, 17-authored Himalaya presentation in your class lectures or other non-publishing outlets.  That presentation is available on the GLIMS site (although it may need to be updated, Bruce, with the revised/expanded document.) --Jeff Dr. Jeffrey Kargel wrote in reply to Oliver Morton's article in the Economist:Jan 22nd 2010 11:38 GMT As a coauthor of the letter to the editor of Science, and a glaciologist, and lead investigator of the GLIMS project (Global Land Ice Measurements from Space), and somebody who was interviewed for and quoted in this article, I should probably respond to some of the comments that simply do not flow logically from what is written in Oliver Morton's Economist article. But first, I was not a part of the IPCC or a reviewer of the voluminous IPCC Fourth Assessment. I am a reader and user of it; and as reasonable readers of the Economist may surmise, I do not fear the truth, and will work to uncover the truth. This Economist article is fairly accurate and reflects the situation reasonably well; there was a very embarrassing, grossly erroneous paragraph in an encyclopedic document. The IPCC Fourth Assessment is 99.9% correct, as far as science knows; this Economist article, and almost all media reporting in the last week, is not about the 99.9%, it's about the 0.1%. There is a strong consensus about this among people qualified and educated to make an independent assessment. It is filled with facts and measurements and observations, models, and inferences. The factual data are very solid throughout almost the entire set of documents. It was painstakingly reviewed and well substantiated in almost every section of every chapter; this is evident in the thoroughness, the references, the presentation quality, and the depth and insight of the analysis. It is a very good documentation of the state and recent changes of the Earth climate system and of projected future changes. The models are based on physics, the science which has given us missions to Mars, submarines to the seafloor, jet airplanes, air conditioners, power plants, automobiles, and a comparatively high standard of living for Brits and Americans and Indians and Chinese. If you want to look for nails in coffins, go to a graveyard; the IPCC is not where you'll find them. There was a really--REEEALLY--bad paragraph. A horrific paragraph; unbelievable inaccuracy, poor referencing, basically no basis in reality, amidst an exceedingly detailed and accurate overall document. One paragraph. It had to be corrected, and I helped to force a correction. Such is not a nail, it's not a sliver of a coffin. People who have pre-ordained conclusions, handed down by God or otherwise, will not find logic or reason or observations or common sense to be something worth listening to. So I comment to the others among you, who may have the capacity to listen and to try to comprehend and fathom what is going on all around you. The climate science that explains why Earth is warming due to greenhouse gases accumulating in our planet's atmosphere is the very same climate science that explains why Venus is so torrid being so close to the sun and having a greenhouse atmosphere 100 times denser than Earth's, why Mars is really cold but a tad warmer than it would be without its tenuous greenhouse atmosphere, and why Earth had ice ages and super-hothouse periods in the geologic past. The physics is not mysterious. It's a little more complex than the fact that ice taken out of the freezer in your home will melt, a little more complex than your 5-day weather forecast, a little more complex than why a your night-time temperature cools a little bit on a cloudy night but a lot on a clear night; a little more complex than the explanation for why your car heats up with the windows rolled up or your bed warms up when you climb in with your spouse. The greenhouse effect is not speculation, it's not hypothesis; it's observed reality. CO2 is transparent to visible light and opaque to infrared; water vapor is, too; likewise, methane. These gases let sunlight into the lower atmosphere and onto the surface, the surface heats up, and tries to cool off, but the emitted infrared radiation is blocked by these gases. So the atmosphere heats up more than if these gases were absent and a little more than if these gases were present but not abundant. The physics is well understood. There are uncertainties in the models of future climate, definitely, such as how clouds form and disperse; such as how much gasoline and coal we're going to burn and whether controls are instituted or not. But the fact is, we are observing the effects of greenhouse gases, and those effects are steadily rising, sharply rising by the standards of climate variability over the whole course of human history. Yes, Himalayan glaciers are melting rapidly (but few by 2035). Cultures have risen and fallen with climate shifts smaller than what we are now experiencing. We are now emerging from the envelope of all historical experience with changing climate. I am not a doomsdayer. I see plenty reason for hope. My optimism fast fades when I consider models where people look for fictional nails in coffins, and seek to confuse or give in to confusion and paralysis of intelligent thought and careful deed. 		 	   		  
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