Fallible Forecasts

In 2007, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change surprised scientists when it declared in its seminal report on global warming that certain huge Himalayan glaciers might melt away completely by 2035. “It’s physically impossible to kill the ice that fast,” Jeffrey Kargel, a professor at the University of Arizona who studies glaciers, told The Washington Post. A recent letter to the editor in the journal Science noted that the …