Science panel constituted by UN to review IPCC report

웃 · February 28, 2010

The UN climate report which was under scanner for being erroneous will now be reviewed by an independent board of scientists, an environment spokesperson of the U.N. announced on Friday.

Last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had admitted that the rate at which Himalayan glaciers were melting had been exaggerated in its 2007 report. And then this month, accepted that there had been an exaggeration in stating the area of Netherlands presently below the sea level.

Reviewing the report

IPCC 2007 report had shared that year’s Nobel Peace prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and had established a need for a more determined treaty for checking climate change than the existing Kyoto Protocol.

Nick Nuttall, spokesman for the U.N. Environment Programme, said that the structure and method of the review panel would be made known in the coming week in Bali.

"It will be a credible, sensible review of how the IPCC operates, to strengthen its fifth report," he said.

"It should do a review of the IPCC, produce a report by, say, August. There is a plenary of the IPCC in South Korea in October. The review will go there for adoption. I think we are bringing some level of closure to this issue," Nuttall added.

IPCC’s fourth report was published in 2007 and the fifth is expected by 2014.

IPCC stands by its claims

In its report, the IPCC had stated that the Himalayas could melt by 2035, however, a source from within the organization later spoke about the glacier thawing out by 2350 and not 2035, as mentioned in the report.

The IPCC had arrived at the year 2035 on basis on a non-peer reviewed WWF paper, which had cited a Scientific American article as its source.

Nuttall said that the review panel will keep all options open during the process of analyzing the report. These also include, setting up a yardstick for treating "grey literature" – scholarly papers which have not been printed in peer-reviewed journals.

On Wednesday, Pachauri said that the IPCC stood by the main finding of its fourth report and that it was almost 90 per cent sure that global warming over the last 50 years has been caused by human activities.

Strong public view in support of risks posed by global warming is likely to be weakened by these errors and the exposé through hacked emails that show scientists sneering at skeptics.

Nuttall said, all the participants attending the conference in Bali agreed about human activities like greenhouse emissions being responsible for climate change.

"There was absolutely no government, no minister of environment who attended that meeting who said that the IPCC was the wrong vehicle for understanding the science of climate change," he added.

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