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Himalayan glaciers: The big picture is a montage

Unusual miscarriages of science (1, 2) recently rocked climate change science and glaciology. An infamous paragraph, uncharacteristic of the rest of the contribution of Working Group II to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment, claimed that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 (1). In such a monumental report, errors can be expected. However, this error, explicated in ref. 3, shredded the reputation of a large and usually rigorous international virtual institution. The gaffe by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change helped to trigger a global political retreat from climate change negotiations, and it may prove to have been one of the more consequential scientific missteps in human history. An equally incorrect claim, on a different timescale, was that large Himalayan glaciers may be responding today to climate shifts 6,000–15,000 y ago (2). However, both mistakes (1, 2) and some solid scientific reporting on Himalayan glacier dynamics (4–10) highlight large gaps in the observational record. In PNAS, Fujita and Nuimura (11) competently reduced the knowledge gap.