From The Times (UK) [h/t KL]:
A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.
Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.
In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.
It turns out the Himalayan glaciers have probably been melting slowly in recent years, but there is no way they could possibly disappear by 2035. To repeat what turned out to be unfounded speculation that the glaciers were melting that fast was just plain shoddy and lazy on the part of the IPCC.
Just to be clear, this bit of evidence does not refute hypotheses of global warming. It just highlights the bad science and the politicized nature of that bad science.