This mistake in the 986 page second volume of the Assessment Report is one of only a handful that people have found in the report since its publication in 2007. Another mistake was to assert that half of the Netherlands is below sea level; in fact, it’s something like 27%. The other mistakes are similar: regrettable in a publication on which the world relies for information about climate change, but hardly things to make one lose confidence in the report.

The annual assessment report was of course wrong to incorporate a claim in a non-peer reviewed article — that the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035. But the claim that the Himalayan glaciers are melting is not bogus. It’s happening. And the irony of this controversy is that the non-peer reviewed estimate may turn out to be right. The one way that computer models have commonly called things wrong has been to underestimate, not overestimate, the rate at which the polar ice cap and various glaciers would melt. So, let’s all make a pact to quit smoking and lose weight so that we can last until 2035 and see for ourselves whether the Himalayas have become bare rock.