Separate panel to review IPCC work

The Economic Times , Sunday, February 28, 2010
Correspondent :

NEW DELHI: With the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) under attack, the UN has decided to step in to shore up the intergovernmental panel's credibility. At the UN Environment Programme meeting in Bali, it was decided that an independent board of scientists would review the work of the IPCC.

"It will be a credible, sensible review of how the IPCC operates, to strengthen its fifth report. 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," UNEP spokesman Nick Nuttall said. The remit and process of the review panel would be disclosed next week.

In what would be good news for the climate science panel, governments and ministers attending the Bali conference reaffirmed their confidence that manmade greenhouse gas emissions were stoking 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," Nuttall said.

The IPCC has been under consistent attack since the Copenhagen climate conference. Concerns about the credibility of is Fourth Assessment Report were raised after the panel accepted that it had made an error by on the issue of the pace at which the Himalayan glaciers were melting. Another error which the IPCC accepted was that of overstating how much of the Netherlands is below sea level. While the error over the Himalayan glaciers was acknowledged by the IPCC as a failure to undertake due diligence, the mistake over the Netherlands was attributed to erroneous information received from the Dutch government.

According to Mr Nuttall, the review will also look at how to treat "grey literature" — a term for academic papers which are not published in peer-reviewed journals.

IPCC chief RK Pachauri has consistently maintained that the IPCC stood by its main 2007 finding — that it was more than 90 percent certain that human activities were the main cause of global warming in the past 50 years.

 
SOURCE : http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2010-02-28/news/28413622_1_ipcc-fourth-assessment-report-intergovernmental-panel
 


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