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January 7, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A new study published in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience has concluded that the claimed melting of the Himalayan glaciers, trumpeted by the United Nations as “proof” for catastrophic global warming, does not match the evidence. Instead, the researchers found that many glaciers in the Himalayas are expanding or stable.

Noting that their study corrects “erroneous statements in the fourth report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” the authors say that their results show “that there is no uniform response of Himalayan glaciers to climate change.”

Rajendra K. Pachauri, head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), famously claimed in the IPPC’s fourth assessment report in 2007 that the probability of the Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high,” a claim rejected at the time by India’s leading glaciologist, Dr. Vijay Raina.  Pachuari responded by calling Raina a practitioner of “voodoo science.”

In January of 2010 the IPPC admitted that the claim about the Himalayas melting was was not based on any peer-reviewed scientific study, but rather an interview by climate scientist Syed Hasnain with the left-wing magazine New Scientist. The organization publicly apologized for the error, but Pachauri continued to assert that the Himalayan glaciers were melting at a “rapid rate,” according to Britain’s Telegraph newspaper.

However, the new study by Dirk Scherler, Bodo Bookhagen, and Manfred R. Strecker of the Universities of Potsdam and California at Santa Barbara, indicates that there are “strong spatial variations in glacier behavior” in the Himalayas. “More than 65% of the monsoon-influenced glaciers that we observed are retreating, but heavily debris-covered glaciers with stagnant low-gradient terminus regions typically have stable fronts,” the authors write, adding that “In contrast, more than 50% of observed glaciers in the westerlies-influenced Karakoram region in the northwestern Himalaya are advancing or stable.”

The image of melting glaciers in the Himalayas has been called one of the two principal “icons” of global warming alarmism, along with polar bears, who have been declared a “threatened” species despite the fact that their numbers are growing.  Defenders of the theory of catastrophic global warming claim that within 20-40 years the polar bears could be extinct due to higher global temperatures. 

Population control has been one of the principle underlying objectives of leading proponents of the concept of human caused global warming. During the 2009 climate change conference in Copenhagen population control emerged as a key issue after it was brought forward by Chinese delegates. In 2010 Ted Turner, founder of CNN, called on, on world leaders to address the global warming crisis by drastically reducing the number of people on the planet. The UN Population Fund has also been leading the push for drastic de-population measures as what it claims is a necessary tactic to combat climate change.