TerryRC: What about Himalayn Pseudo-science Baloney?

A 2007 warning from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that Himalayan glaciers would be completely gone by 2035 due to global warming may be retracted in the coming days.

New revelations concerning this claim indicate that it actually came from a 1999 article in a scientific journal that was in no way verified by any members of the IPCC.

As Britain's Sunday Times reported Sunday, in the wake of ClimateGate e-mail messages showing IPCC scientists manipulating climate data, a retraction of this Himalayan glacier warning would further undermine claims by these people that the science is settled concerning man's role in global warming (h/t Ed Morrissey):
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Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 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.

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.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.

Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said he would recommend that the claim about glaciers be dropped: "If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, than I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments."