The Melt That 2035 Would Need

In 2007 an IPCC chapter said the likelihood of Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035 was very high; the IPCC later deleted the paragraph. The chapter’s own table of retreat rates recomputes row for row, bar one number the IPCC corrected, yet nothing the chapter printed yields 2035: its 30.2 km Gangotri Glacier, at the 23 m a year its table prints, lasts until 3314. Run the chapter’s own rule, if the present rate continues, on the satellite-measured ice loss of the Himalaya’s glaciers and the ice lasts until 2146; for 2035 it would have to melt 4.17 times faster, 31.7 standard deviations away under the dataset’s published errors and 7.7 under a worst case. Glacier by glacier, 2035 is when 18.6% of them, holding 1.5% of the ice, would be gone.

The chapter’s evidence reproduces, 8 of 9 rows exactly and the ninth as the IPCC corrected it, but its date does not: its own Gangotri numbers give 3314. Run on the satellite record of the Himalaya’s 18,596 glaciers, its rule gives 2146 for the ice and needs 4.17 times the measured loss for 2035, 31.7 standard deviations from what was measured under the dataset’s published errors and 7.7 under a worst case; planted into a copy of the record at that size, the claim comes back as 2035, so the record could have seen it. Glacier by glacier, 2035 is when 18.6% of them, holding 1.5% of the ice, would reach zero.

Everything below is computed in your browser from frozen extracts of the published record, each file pinned by its checksum. Numbers taken from a publication are marked as printed and cited where they appear; every rule, interval and comparison the page adds is its own and says so. The check at the bottom recomputes the page against itself while you read it.

I · the claim, at full strength

Very high, by the year 2035

In 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published the second volume of its Fourth Assessment Report, on impacts and adaptation. Chapter 10, on Asia, has a case study of the Himalayan glaciers. Its second paragraph reads, in full:

Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km² by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005).

R.V. Cruz, H. Harasawa, M. Lal, S. Wu, Y. Anokhin, B. Punsalmaa, Y. Honda, M. Jafari, C. Li and N. Huu Ninh, 2007: Asia. Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson (eds.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, section 10.6.2, p. 493

The paragraph points at its evidence, Table 10.9, and the section around it prints more numbers of its own: Himalayan glaciers “cover about three million hectares or 17% of the mountain area”; their “glacial snowfields store about 12,000 km3 of freshwater”; there are “about 15,000 Himalayan glaciers”; and “the 30.2 km long Gangotri glacier” was receding at 7.3 m a year between 1842 and 1935 and “about 23 m per year” between 1985 and 2001. The IPCC later corrected two of these in its errata list: “about 12,000” became “several thousand”, and the sentence with Gangotri’s two rates was deleted, with its reference. The page takes every number at the strength printed in 2007, starting with the table, and says where the IPCC later changed one.

The exception is not the page’s discovery. The IPCC’s list of errata for the volume has carried it since at least April 2010, and today, in the list last updated on 15 April 2013, as Chapter 10 item 12: “Page 494. Table 10.9. Line 2. Replace “135.2” with “23.5”.” That is the value the engine computes, 23.5 once rounded. So the table is reproduced: eight rows exactly, and the ninth exactly as the IPCC itself later corrected it. The glaciers in it were retreating, as the chapter says. The table is the claim’s evidence at full strength, and it checks.

What the chapter’s own numbers give

What the table cannot do is give a date. It records how far eight glacier snouts moved, in nine records, not how much ice is left, and no number in the chapter, run through the paragraph’s own rule, produces 2035. The chapter prints one glacier with both a length and a rate: Gangotri, 30.2 km long, receding about 23 m a year. Let the present rate continue from 2001, the last year of that record, and its length runs out in 3314. The errata later deleted the sentence with that rate but kept the length, and Table 10.9 prints the same 23.0 m a year for Gangotri over 1985 to 2001, so the corrected chapter gives the same year.

The other numbers run the same way. A store of 12,000 km3 of water gone between the chapter’s publication and 2035, 28 years, needs 428.6 Gt a year (a cubic kilometre of water weighs a gigatonne): 1.61 times the 267 ± 16 Gt a year that Hugonnet and colleagues measured for all the world’s glaciers together over 2000 to 2019. But the IPCC’s errata replace “about 12,000” with “several thousand”, and any store under 7,476 km3 (267 Gt a year for 28 years) needs less than all the world’s glaciers lose. So the 1.61 rests on the number the IPCC replaced, and a store of several thousand could fall on either side of that line. The arithmetic is the page’s, on the chapter’s numbers.

The paragraph’s second sentence gives an area, from “the present 500,000 to 100,000 km²”, a loss of 80%. The same section puts the Himalaya’s glacier cover at about three million hectares, which is 30,000 km². The report the sentence cites, WWF 2005, gives “glacier coverage of 33,000 km2” in its foreword and contains neither 500,000 nor 100,000 km² anywhere in its text. The 500,000 is 16.7 times the chapter’s own figure, and 27.6 times the 18,119 km² of glacier in the Randolph Glacier Inventory’s Himalaya that this page uses below. It is within 3.4% of the 483,412 km² that Hugonnet and colleagues print for all the world’s glaciers except those on Greenland’s periphery and in the Antarctic and subantarctic. Those ratios are the page’s.

So the claim at full strength is this. Its evidence reproduces exactly, and its date does not: 2035 as printed, against 3314 from the chapter’s own Gangotri numbers. The page prints both and does not pretend the second is the first.

The same report says it twice more, in other words. The Technical Summary, in Box TS.6 on p. 59: “If current warming rates are maintained, Himalayan glaciers could decay at very rapid rates, shrinking from the present 500,000 km² to 100,000 km² by the 2030s.” The bullet is marked “** D”, which the Technical Summary’s key reads as high confidence and a development since the previous assessment. And the chapter’s map of hotspots, Figure 10.4 on p. 481: “If current warming rates are maintained, glaciers located over Tibetan Plateau are likely to shrink at very rapid rates from 500,000 km² in 1995 to 100,000 km² by the 2030s.” The IPCC’s 2010 statement names the paragraph and Box TS.6. Its errata later deleted both, and replaced the text of the Figure 10.4 box with “Most Tibetan Plateau glaciers shorter than 4 km in length are projected to disappear with 3°C temperature rise and no change in precipitation. [10.4.4.3]”

II · where the words were before 2007

Four earlier texts, dated

The paragraph cites one source, WWF 2005. Words and numbers like its own can be read in four texts printed before 2007. Choose one, and the page marks the runs of four or more consecutive words it shares with the IPCC paragraph, longest first, each word counted once. The matching is the page’s computation. It shows shared wording, and says nothing about who read whom.

1. 1996 · UNESCO, Paris

   A technical document of UNESCO’s International Hydrological Programme, edited by V.M. Kotlyakov, forecasts the shrinking of the Earth’s extrapolar glaciation, the glaciers outside the polar ice sheets, whose “total area is close to 500,000 km²” (p. 63):

   The extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates [a dash in the original] its total area will shrink from 500,000 to 100,000 km² by the year 2350. Glaciers will survive only in the mountains of inner Alaska, on some Arctic archipelagos, within Patagonian ice sheets, in the Karakoram Mountains, in the Himalayas, in some regions of Tibet and on the highest mountain peaks in the temperature latitudes.

   V.M. Kotlyakov (ed.), Variations of Snow and Ice in the Past and at Present on a Global and Regional Scale, IHP-IV Project H-4.1, UNESCO, Paris, 1996, p. 66; read in the scanned original, where the year is 2350

   The year is 2350, not 2035, and the Himalayas are named among the places where glaciers survive. The page read the year in the scanned page as well as in the searchable text, so the 2350 is not an artefact of text recognition.

2. 30 April 1999 · Down To Earth, New Delhi

   An article on Himalayan glaciers quotes the International Commission on Snow and Ice; then, for “it might happen much sooner”, Syed Iqbal Hasnain, whom it names as chair of the commission’s Working Group on Himalayan Glaciology; then a sentence it attributes to V M Kotlyakov in a report of nearly the same title as the 1996 one, with a different year:

   “Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 is very high,” says the International Commission for Snow and Ice (icsi) in its recent study on Asian glaciers. “But if the Earth keeps getting warmer at the current rate, it might happen much sooner,” says Syed Iqbal Hasnain of the School of Environmental Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. […] “The glacier will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates. Its total area will shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square km by the year 2035,” says former icsi president V M Kotlyakov in the report Variations of snow and ice in the past and present on a global and regional scale

   Down To Earth, Glaciers beating retreat, issue of 30 April 1999 (the date under which the magazine’s own image archive files it); read in the magazine’s web copy

   The article carries a table, “Receding rivers of ice”, with the same title as Table 10.9. Row by row, 8 of its 8 rows appear in Table 10.9 with the same periods, retreats and rates, Pindari’s 135.2 among them. Table 10.9 adds one row, Gangotri for 1985 to 2001, and spells the state Uttaranchal where the article has Uttar Pradesh.

3. 5 June 1999 · New Scientist, London

   A news story on the same glaciers reports a study to be presented to the same commission, with two horizons:

   A new study, due to be presented in July to the International Commission on Snow and Ice (ICSI), predicts that most of the glaciers in the region will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming. […] Hasnain’s four-year study indicates that all the glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas could disappear by 2035 at their present rate of decline. […] has found that glaciers are receding faster in the Himalayas than anywhere else on Earth.

   Fred Pearce, Flooded out, New Scientist 162 (2189), 5 June 1999; the magazine’s web text as archived on 14 January 2010 and 23 December 2015 (the live page could not be fetched for this page)

   It shares no run of four words with the IPCC paragraph. The page has not located the study the story describes. Both of its readings are offered to the control below: “most of the glaciers” by 2039, counted glacier by glacier, and 2035 for the central and eastern Himalaya, as a region.

4. March 2005 · WWF Nepal Program, Kathmandu

   The report the IPCC cites. On its p. 29 it quotes the commission’s working group, with two words different from the Down To Earth version: Himalayas for Himalaya, and livelihood for likelihood.

   In 1999, a report by the Working Group on Himalayan Glaciology (WGHG) of the International Commission for Snow and Ice (ICSI) stated: “glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the livelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 is very high”.

   WWF Nepal Program, An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China, March 2005, p. 29

   Its Table 7 (p. 32) gives Pindari’s retreat for 1845 to 1966 as 23.0 m a year, citing Vohra (1981), not 135.2. It gives the Himalaya 33,000 km² of glacier. It does not contain the area sentence.

Which of these texts reached which is a question they do not settle, and the page does not try. Four glaciologists wrote to Science in January 2010 under the title “Tracking the Source of Glacier Misinformation” (J. Graham Cogley, Jeffrey S. Kargel, G. Kaser and C. J. van der Veen, Science 327: 522); the page cites that letter for the record and has not read its wording. What the texts do settle is smaller and firmer: the 2035 and the Pindari 135.2 were in print in 1999; the area sentence’s numbers were in print in 1996 as a forecast for the whole world with the year 2350; and the source the paragraph cites holds the 2035 sentence but not the area sentence.

III · the deciding control

A statement, and a measurement

What decided the claim was a reading of its sources, not a new measurement. On 20 January 2010 the Chair and Vice-Chairs of the IPCC and the Co-Chairs of its Working Groups issued a one-page statement from Geneva:

It has, however, recently come to our attention that a paragraph in the 938-page Working Group II contribution to the underlying assessment refers to poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly.

IPCC statement on the melting of Himalayan glaciers, Geneva, 20 January 2010

The same day, by the modification date of its PDF, WWF added a correction page to its 2005 report: the 2035 statement “was used in good faith but it is now clear that this was erroneous and should be disregarded”, and the 40-year statement “should also be disregarded as being unsound.”

The IPCC then corrected the chapter itself, in its list of errata for the volume. The list last updated on 15 April 2013, the one the IPCC links from the report’s page today, deletes the paragraph:

Page 493. Column 2. Lines 32-43. Delete this text, through the first two words on line 43 and replace with “Many Himalayan glaciers are retreating (Karma et al., 2003; and see examples in Table 10.9).

Page 493. Column 2. Lines 44-52. Delete this text, beginning with the last two words on line 44, through the first word on line 52.

IPCC, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. The Working Group II contribution to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. Errata, last updated 15 April 2013, Chapter 10 items 10 and 11 (the list prints no closing quotation mark)

Counted on the printed page, the first item runs from “Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster” to “have also adversely affected these glaciers.”, the whole paragraph and the first two sentences of the next; the second runs from “Between 1842”, taking Gangotri’s two rates, to “the economies in the region.” The same list deletes the Technical Summary’s bullet (“Page 59. Box TS.6, Asia section. Delete fourth bullet.”), replaces “about 12,000” with “several thousand”, and deletes the reference Hasnain, 2002. Archived copies of the IPCC’s errata page date these items: they are in the list as updated on 20 October 2011 and not in the list of 24 February 2011. The paragraph is still in the chapter PDF the IPCC serves today, dated 2007 and unchanged: the withdrawal lives beside it, in the statement and the errata.

The statement set the paragraph’s estimates aside and in the same breath reaffirmed the conclusion of the IPCC’s Synthesis Report that “Widespread mass losses from glaciers and reductions in snow cover over recent decades are projected to accelerate throughout the 21st century”. That is a claim too, and the record below tests it as well.

The test that decides the date on the science is the paragraph’s own rule run on measured ice. Two published datasets make that possible glacier by glacier. Hugonnet and colleagues (2021) charted the change in surface elevation of all of Earth’s glaciers from 2000 to 2019, from largely untapped satellite archives, and turned it into a loss of volume and mass for each one. Farinotti and colleagues (2019) estimated how much ice each glacier holds, with up to five models that invert ice thickness from the surface. Divide the one by the other and the paragraph’s rule gives a year.

What the control rests on, and what it chose

• The rule. The paragraph’s own: if the present rate continues. The page divides the ice by the measured loss and adds the result to 1 January 2000, the first day of the record. The ice is referenced to 2000 although the inventory’s outlines date from 1998 to 2013 (median 2001), an approximation worth a year or two.
• Glaciers without a measured rate. 324 of the Himalaya’s glaciers, 22.7 km² in all, have no rate in the dataset. Each is filled at the mean loss per square kilometre of the measured glaciers in its own second-order region, and enters the sums only. Filling at the first-order region’s mean instead changes the sum by under 0.02%.
• Mass or volume. On the mass basis the ice is converted at 900 kg per cubic metre, the page’s round value for glacier ice, and set against the dataset’s own mass loss, which its authors converted from volume at their own density; the ratio of the two columns, summed over the Himalaya in the frozen files, is 850 kg per cubic metre. The volume basis sets ice volume against volume loss and gives 2138 and 3.94 times.
• Errors. The dataset’s printed 95% intervals are twice its one-sigma errors, and the page uses the same factor. Published, scaled by area: for each first-order region, the dataset’s regional one-sigma error times the Himalaya’s share of that region’s area (23.1% of region 14, 70.3% of region 15), added. For a single decade, which the regional table does not carry, the mean of its two five-year errors. Worst case: every glacier’s own error added as if all were wrong in the same direction, 2.84 Gt a year, a deliberate overestimate.
• Volume. Farinotti and colleagues print each region’s volume with an uncertainty of about a quarter (±26.0% for the Himalaya, area-weighted). The page uses the lowest and highest volume they print as a bracket, not as a probability.
• What it refuses. A measurement period before 2000, when the record had not begun; thickness model 5, which gives a thickness for 6.2% of the Himalaya’s glaciers and 0 of region 15’s; model 4 for regions 14 and 15 together, where the glaciers it misses hold 41.1% of the ice; and a year for zero ice at or before 2019, when the record shows the ice still there.

The record reproduces its paper

Summed by this page’s engine from the per-glacier file, region 15 (South Asia East) lost −6.875 Gt a year over 2000 to 2019; the dataset’s own regional table gives −6.8748, a difference of 0.01%. The paper’s Extended Data Table 1 prints −6.9 ± 1.4 Gt a year at 95%; the engine gives −6.9 ± 1.4. Its mean elevation change, the volume loss over the time-evolving area, is −0.56 ± 0.08 m a year, against −0.56 ± 0.08 printed. Region 14 gives −4.6 ± 1.7 Gt and −0.16 ± 0.06 m a year, against −4.6 ± 1.7 and −0.16 ± 0.06 printed.

Faster than in any other part of the world?

The paragraph’s first clause can be set against the same paper. By thinning, which is what the satellites measure, South Asia East lost −0.56 m of ice surface a year over 2000 to 2019 and ranks 11th of the 19 regions in Extended Data Table 1: 10 thin faster, first Iceland at −1.03 and then Central Europe at −1.02 m a year. South Asia West, with the Karakoram, ranks 19th. The clause spoke of snouts receding, which the satellites do not measure, so this answers it only in the record’s own terms. The ranking is the page’s, on the printed numbers.

The loss is real, and it is speeding up

The same record that puts 2035 out of reach shows the glaciers losing ice, and faster in the second decade than the first: 6.35 Gt a year for the Himalaya over 2000 to 2009, 7.45 over 2010 to 2019, 17% more. On its own that difference is not decisive. It is 1.10 Gt a year, ±3.3 at 95% if the two decades’ errors were independent (0.7 standard deviations), and the dataset does not say how far they are correlated. Longer records bear it out. The 38 Himalayan glaciers whose mass balance researchers have measured on the ground, since the first such measurement in 1974, show “a mean wastage of −0.62 ± 0.33 m w.e. a−1” over 1974 to 2023, and “The wastage strongly increased from −0.31 ± 0.34 m w.e. a−1 pre-2000 to −0.66 ± 0.33 m w.e. a−1 post-2000, indicating an acceleration of ∼9 cm w.e. per decade since 1974.” (Azam, Journal of Glaciology, 2026; the same review notes one reconstruction that shows little acceleration, which it attributes to that reconstruction’s smoothing). ICIMOD’s 2026 inventory of the Hindu Kush Himalaya finds “a 12% reduction in total glacier area and a 9% decline in estimated ice reserves” between 1990 and 2020, and “The most pronounced acceleration in glacier shrinkage occurred between 2010 and 2020”. That is the statement’s reaffirmed sentence, measured. The area sentence of 2007 asked for 80% of the area gone in about thirty years; the inventory records 12% in thirty, for the whole Hindu Kush Himalaya.

IV · the control on the control

Could the satellites have seen a 2035 world?

A control that could not have seen the claim proves nothing by failing to see it. So the page gives the claim its size and plants it. In a copy of the per-glacier record, every measured rate in the chosen region and period is multiplied by one factor, the one that empties the region’s ice by the claim year (for New Scientist’s words, read by count, the one that puts most of the glaciers at zero by 2039, as section V explains): for the Himalaya over 2000 to 2019, 4.17, an injected loss of 28.81 Gt a year with the measured pattern from glacier to glacier kept. The unmodified control then reads the copy.

This is the wave’s grade A test: the claim planted into the control’s own data and read by the control’s own function, not a comparison against a published sensitivity. It returns 2035, as it must: the plant is built to give the claim year, so recovering it only shows the plumbing works. The informative number is the distance between the two worlds in the record’s own units. The claim’s loss sits 31.7 standard deviations from the measured loss under the published errors, and 7.7 under the worst case; that distance is the same with or without the plant, and the plant shows the control reads a world of that size correctly. The control could have confirmed the claim. The page’s rule for that sentence: the plant recovers the claim year to within half a year, the rounding to a whole year, and the separation is at least 3 standard deviations. Three is the page’s line: with Gaussian errors, a reading three standard deviations from the truth comes up about once in 740 tries, one-sided. Whether the real record then rules the claim year out is a separate question, answered by its widest bracket, rate and volume together, which begins in 2090. The real record rules the claim year out.

The same record also gives the control’s resolution in years: the earliest year of zero ice that the measurements allow, taking the fastest loss they permit at 95% and the lowest volume printed. For the Himalaya over 2000 to 2019 it is 2090 under the published errors and 2059 under the worst case. Neither is near 2035.

V · glacier by glacier

Nearly a fifth of the glaciers, under a fiftieth of the ice

The claim’s strongest fair reading is not about a region at all. A small glacier with a fast loss can reach zero long before the region’s ice does. So the page runs the paragraph’s rule on each measured glacier separately, its own ice over its own measured loss, and counts. For the Himalaya over 2000 to 2019, 3,402 of 18,270 glaciers, 18.6%, reach zero by 2035 at their own constant rates. They hold 4.1% of the glacier area and 1.5% of the ice.

Two things keep that fifth in proportion. Measurement noise alone manufactures part of it: set every glacier’s true rate to zero, draw a measured rate from its own one-sigma error, and the same reading finds 4.8% to 5.2% of glaciers at zero by 2035 in 20 draws (seed 20260922), a mean of 4.95%, against 4.96% worked out without drawing, from each glacier’s chance of a draw that fast. And the glaciers that go first are small: by 2035 they are 18.6% of the count but 4.1% of the area and 1.5% of the ice. The count also moves with the page’s choices: read by volume instead of mass it is 20.6%, and for all of South Asia East, 32.5%. The reading is crude for the smallest glaciers: by 2020 it already puts 5.4% of them at zero, although the record shows them present through 2019: a sign of how uncertain both the ice and the measured rate of the smallest glaciers are. At constant measured rates, 2035 is roughly when a fifth of the Himalaya’s glaciers by count would be gone, carrying under 2% of its ice. That is the paragraph’s strongest form, and the page offers it as that, not as a vindication.

New Scientist’s 1999 horizon, “most of the glaciers in the region” within 40 years, reads naturally by count. By 2039, 22.1% of Himalayan glaciers reach zero at their measured rates, holding 2.0% of the ice. For more than half of them to be gone by then, every measured rate would have to be 2.17 times what the satellites saw: closer than the 4.17 times that 2035 needs for all the ice, and still outside the record. That multiple is this reading’s claimed size, and the page plants it too: every measured rate in a copy of the record times 2.17, read by the same glacier-by-glacier function, puts 50.0% of the glaciers at zero by 2039, against 22.1% in the real record, and the loss it implies sits 11.7 standard deviations from the measured. Choose New Scientist’s version in the control above to run it on other settings.

For forecasts, glaciologists run models of how each glacier will respond to the climate to come, and those are a different thing from anything on this page. Van Tricht and colleagues (Nature Climate Change, 2026), with three global glacier models, project that South Asia East loses the most glaciers in a single year around 2037 (±2, one standard deviation, the year averaged across warming scenarios), and that of its 12,894 glaciers of 2025, 5,215 remain in 2100 if warming is held to 1.5 °C and 656 at 4 °C. ICIMOD’s 2023 assessment expects the Hindu Kush Himalaya’s glaciers “to lose 30%–50% of their volume by 2100 (very high confidence)” at 1.5 to 2 °C of warming. Those are projections, printed by their authors; the Global Glacier Extinction Explorer, announced on 11 September 2026 at glacierextinction.com, maps them glacier by glacier, and this page does not try to compete with it.

VI · the verdict, dated

What the record says, as of now

Sources for the verdict

1. IPCC, IPCC statement on the melting of Himalayan glaciers, Geneva, 20 January 2010, 1 page, https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/04/himalaya-statement-20january2010.pdf.
2. IPCC, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. The Working Group II contribution to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. Errata, last updated 15 April 2013: Chapter 10 item 10 (the paragraph deleted) and Technical Summary item 7 (the Box TS.6 bullet deleted), in the list by its update of 20 October 2011; Chapter 10 item 12 (Table 10.9, 135.2 replaced with 23.5), in the list by its update of 27 April 2010, https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/Errata_AR4_wg2.pdf.
3. WWF Nepal Program, An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China (2005), correction page added to the PDF (modified 20 January 2010), https://wwfeu.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/himalayaglaciersreport2005.pdf.
4. J. Graham Cogley, Jeffrey S. Kargel, G. Kaser and C. J. van der Veen, Tracking the Source of Glacier Misinformation, Science 327 (5965), 522 (29 January 2010), doi:10.1126/science.327.5965.522-a (a letter; cited for the record, its wording not read by this page).

VII · the check

The check

What this page rests on, and what it chose

• The claimant record. The paragraph, the section’s numbers and Table 10.9 were typed from the chapter PDF the IPCC serves, with page numbers; the errata from the list the IPCC links today, last updated 15 April 2013, dated by archived copies of its earlier versions. The texts of 1996, 1999 and 2005 are short excerpts typed from the copies named in each citation.
• The control data. Per-glacier rates from Hugonnet and colleagues’ dataset (doi:10.6096/13) as mirrored by the OGGM project; per-glacier volumes from Farinotti and colleagues’ thickness estimates (doi:10.3929/ethz-b-000315707), summed per glacier in a table compiled by one of its authors; glacier areas, lengths, names and outline dates from the Randolph Glacier Inventory 6.0 as tabulated by OGGM. Volumes are rounded to the nearest 1,000 m³; everything else is as published.
• The page’s choices, each yours to change. Region, period, thickness model, mass or volume, error model, the claim’s version, the rule for the ice left, and which printed Gangotri rate continues. Fixed by the page: the 900 kg per m³ of ice, the factor of 2 for 95%, the fill for unmeasured glaciers, the start in 2000, the line of 3 standard deviations, and four words as the shortest shared run.
• What it refuses. A period before the record; a thickness model that does not cover 95% of the glaciers and of the ice; a year for zero ice at or before 2019; a year of its own for any glacier with no measured rate; a glacier outside regions 14 and 15.
• What it cannot do. Forecast. The constant-rate year is the claim’s rule, not a model of how glaciers respond to warming, and the loss it holds constant is already speeding up.

The further result, and how far it goes

We searched the web through a general search engine, Crossref, Europe PMC and the Wasteland’s own index on 2026-09-23 and did not find a public page that runs the IPCC chapter’s own rule, if the present rate continues, glacier by glacier on the measured 2000 to 2019 rates for the Himalaya and sets the count, area and ice shares at 2035 beside the share that measurement noise alone produces.