Reference: India already hit by rising temperatures, Bangkok Post, February 3, 2007

For about two years from 2005 to 2007 the IPCC and its entourage of global warmists raised a hue and cry saying that carbon dioxide from fossil fuels was causing the Gangotri glacier in the Himalayan mountains to melt and retreat at an accelerating rate (India already hit by rising temperatures, Bangkok Post, February 3, 2007). The rate of retreat in 2001 was estimated to be 34 meters/year compared with 19 meters/year in 1971. This rate of acceleration was projected forward and we were told that catastrophe and devastation were only a decade away for hundreds of millions of people who depend on rivers fed by the glacier and that the retreat of the Gangotri was a clarion call for their cause.

This clarion has now gone silent possibly because the rate of retreat did not accelerate but slowed to 12 meters/year in 2006 and by 2008 it had stopped altogether. No reason was given for such a big difference between forecast and reality. Instead, the Gangotri glacier, once the darling of the IPCC, was simply forgotten and the global warmists went elsewhere to fish for data that would support their cause.

In the period since data collection began, most of the recorded retreat occurred between 1780 and 1933 well before atmospheric carbon dioxide began to rise.

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand