The Himalayan glaciers are melting, really?

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim in this report was that the world's glaciers were melting so fast that even those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

Now the scientists who were behind this warning have admitted that it was based only on a news story in the New Scientist published eight years before the IPCC's report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report itself was based simply on a telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, an Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. Syed Hasnain has since admitted that his claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research.

It seems that the claim about the melting glaciers is soon to be retracted by the IPCC. I wonder how much publicity the warmist BBC will give this retraction and what else that the IPCC have reported is also based on faulty or insubstantial evidence?

In June the BBC reported that (my emphasis):

"Glacier melting in the Himalayas is http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/8142048.stm to disrupt water supplies within the next 20 to 30 years. Floods and rock avalanches are http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/8142048.stm to increase. Heavily-populated coastal regions, including the deltas of rivers such as the Ganges and Mekong, are likely to be at risk of increased flooding."

I await their corrections...

For an interesting outlook on Himalayan glaciers, I recommend this article which includes the claim that (my emphasis):

"According to Prof Graham Cogley (Trent University, Ontario), a short article on the future of glaciers by a Russian scientist (Kotlyakov, V.M., 1996, The future of glaciers under the expected climate warming, 61-66, in Kotlyakov, V.M., ed., 1996, Variations of Snow and Ice in the Past and at Present on a Global and Regional Scale, Technical Documents in Hydrology, 1. UNESCO, Paris (IHP-IV Project H-4.1). 78p estimates 2350 as the year for disappearance of glaciers, but the IPCC authors misread 2350 as 2035 in the Official IPCC documents, WGII 2007 p. 493!

So we have a raging debate about impending glacier melt-down because of sloppiness of some IPCC authors! Further, according to Kotlyakov, the present glacier area of some 500,000 km2 could shrink to 100,000 km2 and this could happen NOT in 2035 but in 2350, if the current rate of warming continues. "

Douglas Carswell has blogged about this too.