AN INCONVENIENT GOOF

BANZAI7 NEWS--The chief of the Nobel Prize winning United Nations climate change panel admitted on Saturday that its dire warning that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 was “a statistical error,” but said the threat posed by global warming could not be ignored.

Seeking to quell a controversy with great resonance in his native India, Rajendra Pachauri, chief of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, admitted there was no hard science to back the “regrettable” claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear within three decade if global warming goes unchecked but assured that soft science still indicates that glaciers melt when exposed to direct sunlight.

The claim was part of the wide-ranging 2007 report produced by the IPCC, which includes the world’s leading climate change scientists and advises governments on policy to deal with global warming.

“There’s been this error, but that in no way detracts from the value of the report or the impact it has had on the Hollywood motion picture industry” Mr Pachauri told journalists in Delhi. “Rational people see the larger picture and are not going to be distracted by this one small error.”

The team is headed Hollywood USA to detect reasons for this week's Southern Californian monsoon.