A single mistake shouldn't sink a boatload of science. Bias, however, will corrode any hull.
Both interpretations have been applied to a mistake by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concerning glaciers in the Himalayas. IPCC is the volunteer scientific group set up in 1989 by the United Nations Environment Program and World Meteorological Organization to assess climate science and support policy-making. In its four-volume Fourth Assessment Report of 2007, IPCC said Himalayan glaciers faced a "very high" likelihood of disappearing by 2035—"and perhaps sooner." This month it retracted the warning.
Broader assessment
The wayward paragraph, IPCC said, contained "poorly substantiated estimates" of the melting rate and date when the glaciers would be gone. "In drafting the paragraph in question," it said, "the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly." Nevertheless, IPCC added, the general conclusion of the report is "robust, appropriate, and entirely consistent with the underlying science and the broader IPCC assessment."
The broader assessment, of course, is that most observed warming since the middle of the 20th century "very likely" results from human activity and threatens, among other things, glaciers and water supplies. "Widespread mass losses from glaciers and reductions in snow cover over recent decades are projected to accelerate throughout the 21st century, reducing water availability, hydropower potential, and changing seasonality of flows in regions supplied by meltwater from major mountain regions (e.g. Hindu-Kush, Himalaya, Andes), where more than one sixth of the world population currently lives," IPCC says.
Scary stuff, this. A sixth of the world without enough water to drink. Given the dire potential and mass of scientific arcana in the IPCC's report, how can anyone worry about a lone blooper? That, of course, is the question raised by promoters of urgent and costly precautions against the dangerous warming they believe to be looming.
Yes, the Himalayan mistake represents a solo lapse in a mammoth project. But it also fits a pattern.
In 2001, IPCC's Third Assessment Report prominently featured the infamous "hockey-stick" reconstruction of proxy temperature data from the Northern Hemisphere. The name describes the shape of a graph that seemed to show many centuries of stability in global average temperature until the time of industrialization, when temperatures began to zoom. The hockey-stick had powerful persuasive effect. It offered a simple, graphic rebuke to scientists suggesting that the uptrend in temperature over the last century resulted from natural cycles. After statistical analysis behind the graph came under challenge, though, IPCC felt obliged in its 2007 assessment report to moderate its conclusions and present a range of reconstructions of historical temperature data, many of which do indicate temperature oscillations before the Industrial Age.
More recently, scientists responsible for data central to IPCC's computer modeling have been shown to have manipulated numbers and suppressed findings of anyone resistant to their push for political warming responses. Like the hockey stick and Himalayan-glacier glitch, controversy over those apparent failures of integrity has been dismissed as a sideshow staged by unholy skeptics, a tactical distraction from a scientific consensus supporting the need for prompt action against warming, whatever the cost.
The consensus
To the extent scientific consensus does or even can exist, however, IPCC is it. And IPCC consistently errs on the frightening side in its summaries for policy-makers. Scientists involved in past assessment reports have complained about the political spin the summaries give their material. Even the way IPCC describes its initial task asserts conclusions: "Prepare a comprehensive review and recommendations with respect to the state of knowledge of the science of climate change, social and economic impact of climate change, possible response strategies, and elements for inclusion in a possible future international convention on climate."
A group with such a view of itself isn't likely to conclude that observed warming is mostly natural and that governmental restraint will remain the best policy option until more is known. The record, in fact, increasingly suggests an activist bias. Until that changes, IPCC will look like a pressure group with shrinking credibility.
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