Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035

Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035
	CORRECTED
	"The glaciers of the Himalayas are very likely to disappear by the year 2035 or sooner if the Earth continues warming at its current rate."
Domain	Science & Environment
Tactic	Statistical & Evidentiary Distortion;
Era	Current
First seen	1999
Origin	A 1999 magazine interview with a glaciologist, repeated in a 2005 WWF report and then included in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 assessment
Last reviewed	2026-10-27
	Further reading: books on Science & Environment

The claim that Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035 appeared in the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world's leading scientific assessment of climate change. The statement was wrong. It was not based on peer-reviewed research but on a speculative comment in a 1999 magazine interview, passed on through a report by the environmental group WWF. Glaciologists pointed out the error in late 2009, and in January 2010 the IPCC publicly acknowledged it and expressed regret. Himalayan glaciers are in fact shrinking, and current projections indicate large losses by 2100, but nothing like complete disappearance by 2035. The episode was widely used to attack the IPCC and led to reforms in how it handles sources.

The claim

Chapter 10 of the 2007 report of the IPCC's Working Group II, which dealt with impacts on Asia, stated that glaciers in the Himalayas were receding faster than in any other part of the world and that the likelihood of their disappearing by 2035 or perhaps sooner was very high if warming continued. The report also misstated the total area of Himalayan glaciers.

Origin

Investigations traced the claim to a 1999 article in New Scientist, which quoted the Indian glaciologist Syed Hasnain as saying that most of the glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas could vanish within 40 years. Hasnain later said this was speculation and not based on published research. A 2005 WWF report repeated the claim, and the IPCC authors cited the WWF report. Some researchers have suggested that a date in a 1996 Russian publication, 2350, may have been confused with 2035 somewhere along the way.

What the evidence shows

The error was caught by scientists. In late 2009 glaciologists, including J. Graham Cogley of Trent University, pointed out that the claim was implausible; Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of meters thick and could not melt away in a few decades. Cogley and colleagues published a letter in Science in January 2010.
IPCC acknowledgment. On January 20, 2010, the IPCC issued a statement saying that the paragraph referred to poorly substantiated estimates of the rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers, and that the clear and well-established standards of evidence required by IPCC procedures had not been applied properly.
Review of procedures. An independent review by the InterAcademy Council in 2010 recommended changes to IPCC procedures, including stricter rules on the use of "grey literature," sources that are not peer reviewed.
The real picture. Himalayan glaciers are losing ice. A 2019 assessment by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) projected that even if global warming were limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the Hindu Kush Himalaya region would lose about one-third of its glacier volume by 2100, and that under high emissions it could lose about two-thirds. These glaciers feed rivers that supply water to hundreds of millions of people.

Why it matters

The error was small within a report of thousands of pages, but it became a major controversy, especially because it emerged weeks after the "Climategate" email affair and during the Copenhagen climate summit. Critics used it to argue that the IPCC was alarmist and unreliable. Supporters of the IPCC noted that the error was in a regional impacts chapter, did not appear in the physical science assessment, and was identified and corrected by scientists themselves. Both points can be true: the error was real and should have been caught, and the broader findings on glacier loss remain sound.

Lessons for readers

Even authoritative reports can contain errors; check whether claims rest on peer-reviewed evidence.
Trace striking figures back to their original source.
A correction is a sign that error-checking processes are working.
One error does not invalidate an entire body of evidence, but it does warrant scrutiny.
Exaggeration by advocates can damage public trust in real problems.

Sources

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC statement on the melting of Himalayan glaciers, January 20, 2010.
J. Graham Cogley, Jeffrey S. Kargel, G. Kaser and C. J. van der Veen, "Tracking the Source of Glacier Misinformation," Science 327, no. 5965 (2010).
InterAcademy Council, Climate Change Assessments: Review of the Processes and Procedures of the IPCC (2010).
Philippus Wester et al., eds., The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment (ICIMOD and Springer, 2019).