Netherlands adds to UN climate report controversy

Yahoo News 5 Feb 10;

THE HAGUE (AFP) – The Netherlands has asked the UN climate change panel to explain an inaccurate claim in a landmark 2007 report that more than half the country was below sea level, the Dutch government said Friday.

According to the Dutch authorities, only 26 percent of the country is below sea level, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be asked to account for its figures, environment ministry spokesman Trimo Vallaart told AFP.

The incident could cause further embarrassment for the IPCC, which recently admitted a claim in the same report that global warming could melt Himalayan glaciers by 2035 was wrong.

IPCC experts calculated that 55 percent of the Netherlands was below sea level by adding the area below sea level -- 26 percent -- to the area threatened by river flooding -- 29 percent -- Vallaart said.

"They should have been clearer," Vallaart said, adding that the Dutch office for environmental planning, an IPCC partner, had exact figures.

Correcting the error had been "on the agenda several times" but had never actually happened, Vallaart said.

The spokesman said he regretted the fact that proper procedure was not followed and said it should not be left to politicians to check the IPCC's numbers.

The Dutch environment ministry will order a review of the report to see if it contains any more errors, Vallaart said.

The IPCC's 938-page Fourth Assessment Report spurred politicians around the world to vow action with its warning that climate change was on the march, but the body has faced fierce criticism over the glacier mistake.

Glaciologists have discredited the Himalaya claim, which is being withdrawn, and the controversy has given fresh ammunition to climate sceptics.

No evidence could be found to show the claim had been published in a peer-reviewed journal and reports in Britain have said the reference came from green group the WWF, who in turn sourced it to the New Scientist magazine.

U.N. climate panel reviews Dutch sea level glitch
Alister Doyle, Reuters 5 Feb 10;

OSLO (Reuters) - The U.N.'s panel of climate experts said on Friday it was reviewing whether it wrongly said that more than half of the Netherlands is below sea level in a new glitch after exaggerating the thaw of Himalayan glaciers.

"We are looking into it," said Brenda Abrar-Milani, a spokeswoman for the Geneva-based Secretariat of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

A 2007 report stretching to about 3,000 pages includes the sentence that "the Netherlands is an example of a country highly susceptible to both sea-level rise and river flooding because 55 percent of its territory is below sea level."

But the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, which supplied the data, said on Friday that it should have read that "55 percent of the Netherlands is at risk of flooding."

Only 26 percent of the country is below sea level and 29 percent susceptible to river flooding, such as along the Meuse and Waal rivers well above sea level, it said in a statement.

"The Netherlands is sensitive to climate change. Sea level rise as well as peak river discharges require precautionary measures. The incorrect wording in the IPCC report does not affect this conclusion," it said.

HIMALAYAS

Earlier, the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) defended the panel, saying that an error linked to the Himalayas did not affect overall conclusions that global warming is caused by human activities such as burning fossil fuels.

The panel "remains without doubt the best and most solid foundation" for assessing climate change, said Achim Steiner, head of UNEP, which sponsors the IPCC.

Steiner said criticisms of the IPCC and its chairman Rajendra Pachauri had reached "almost witch-hunting proportions in some quarters" as that some wrongly dismissed "climate change as a hoax on a par with the Y2K computer bug."

Steiner said it was right to expose errors and re-check sources and also right that the panel had acknowledged a need for tougher controls.

"But let us also put aside a myth that the science of climate change is holed below the water line and is sinking fast on a sea of falsehoods," he wrote in the article, distributed by international non-profit group Project Syndicate.

Steiner said a "typographical error" was at the root of the error in the report that projected that the Himalayas could all melt by 2035. One original source had spoken of the world's glaciers melting by 2350, not 2035.

"The IPCC is as fallible as the human beings that comprise it," he wrote.

The Himalayan error -- and exposure of poor checks and reliance on "grey literature" outside peer-reviewed journals -- has damaged the IPCC, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President and climate campaigner Al Gore.

The IPCC concluded in 2007 that it is more than 90 percent certain that mankind is the main cause of global warming by burning fossil fuels. climate change could cause more droughts, floods, disease, species extinctions and rising sea levels.

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(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)