Here's some more grist for the climate change skeptic mill: turns out the glaciers in the Himalayas, which the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claimed had a "very high" likelihood of being completely gone by 2035, are going to stick around a little longer. Like, three centuries longer.
From the Guardian:
The assertion, now discredited, was included in the most recent IPCC report assessing climate change science, published in 2007. Those reports are widely credited with convincing the world that human activity was causing global warming.
But Pachauri admitted in an IPCC statement (pdf) that in this case "the clear and well-established standards of evidence required by the IPCC procedures were not applied properly", and "poorly substantiated estimates" of the speed of glacier melting had made it into print.
The Pachauri referred to there is Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC. He defended the claim for months before admitting it was bogus, which will add even more fuel to the skeptic fire.
I understand that, with the massive body of evidence the IPCC is collecting on climate change and the massive number of scientists it takes to amass that data, mistakes will be made. And no doubt the opposition will take every advantage those mistakes. But there's a way to minimize the damage, and in this case—as well as the pre-COP15 email scandal—it seems the powers that be were far too slow to admit they had a problem.
The impulse to cover-up mistakes in such a contentious and momentous debate must be a strong one, I assume. But the more these errors are concealed, the more explosive they are when they're eventually revealed. It's hard not to wonder, even if you're committed to the cause, what else you're not being told.
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