Lorne Gunter: First Climategate, now Glaciergate

Posted: January 20, 2010, 8:30 AM by NP Editor
Lorne Gunter

Hot on the heels of Climategate — the leaking of thousands of emails and computer files that show many of the world’s leading climate scientists fudging the results of their global warming research and contriving to keep skeptics from being published in academic journals — comes what could be called Glaciergate.

Prominent among the claims of impending environmental disaster in the UN’s fourth report on climate change, published in 2007, was the prediction that all of the 15,000 glaciers in the Himalayas could melt away by 2035. That’s just 25 years away. Now the Times of London has discovered that this claim was not based on scientific enquiry, but rather on speculation. And old speculation at that.

In 1999 the magazine The New Scientist interviewed an Indian climatologist named Syed Hasnain. He told reporter Fred Pearce that it was his “speculationâ€