U.N. Climate Panel Apologizes for Faulty 2007 Statement on Melting Glaciers

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the division of the United Nations that researches global warming, apologized Wednesday for a 2007 report that claimed the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, CNN reports.

The IPCC was responding a controversy swirling around a particular paragraph in the 2007 statement that had come from a long chain of popular articles -- essentially scientific hearsay. The statement read: "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world, and if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometers by the year 2035."

The paragraph was based on information from a 2005 report by the World Wildlife Fund, which had in turn been taken from an article that appeared in the popular UK science journal, The New Scientist in June 1999. The data in the original article was later deemed faulty, and the IPCC called its own statement "poorly substantiated," admitting that "well-established standards of evidence were not applied properly."