Sunanda Creagh, Reuters 26 Feb 10;
NUSA DUA, Indonesia (Reuters) - An independent board of scientists is to review the work of a U.N. climate panel, whose credibility came under attack after it published errors, a U.N. environment spokesman said on Friday.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) accepted last month that its 2007 report had exaggerated the pace of melt of Himalayan glaciers, and this month admitted the report had also overstated how much of the Netherlands is below sea level.
The report shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, and has driven political momentum to agree a new, more ambitious climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol.
The remit and process of the review panel would be disclosed next week, said Nick Nuttall, spokesman for the U.N. Environment Programme, on the sidelines of a UNEP conference of environment ministers and officials from more than 135 countries in the Indonesian island of 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."
The latest, fourth IPCC report was published in 2007 and the next is due in 2014.
HUMANS TO BLAME
All options are on the table for the review, Nuttall said, including, how to treat "grey literature" -- a term for academic papers which are not published in peer-reviewed journals.
The IPCC had said that the Himalayas could melt by 2035, but an original source spoke of the world's glaciers melting by 2350, not 2035. The IPCC report had cited the 2035 year from a non-peer reviewed WWF paper, which in turn had referred to a Scientific American article.
Public conviction of global warming's risks may have been undermined by the panel's errors and by the disclosure of hacked emails revealing scientists sniping at skeptics, who leapt on these as evidence of data fixing.
Pachauri told Reuters on Wednesday 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.
Governments and ministers attending the conference this week in Bali reaffirmed their confidence that manmade greenhouse gas emissions were stoking climate change, said Nuttall.
"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 added.
The IPCC's 2007 assessment report on the causes and impacts of climate change was over 3,000 pages long, cited more than 10,000 scientific papers and is policymakers' main data source.
(Additional reporting by Gerard Wynn in London; Editing by Elizabeth Fullerton)
UN to review controversial climate panel
Jerome Rivet Yahoo News 26 Feb 10;
NUSA DUA, Indonesia (AFP) – The United Nations said Friday it would conduct an independent review of its Nobel prize-winning climate panel, whose credibility has been hit by errors in a key report on global warming.
The UN's plan was announced as environmental experts at an international meeting hailed the opportunity to make progress on climate change after last year's Copenhagen talks ended in chaos and urged India and China to come on board.
Demands have mounted for a major overhaul at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose chairman Rajendra Pachauri has also come under fire for his stewardship of the body and alleged conflict of interest.
UN Environment Programme spokesman Nick Nuttall said at the meeting on the Indonesian resort island of Bali that a body appointed by independent scientists would be set up to "review and strengthen" the IPCC.
The world's top climate science panel is made up of several thousand scientists tasked with vetting scientific knowledge on climate change and its impacts.
But its reputation was damaged by a warning in a major 2007 report that global warming could melt Himalayan glaciers by 2035, a claim that has been widely discredited and fuelled scepticism in some quarters about mankind's role in climate change.
Ahead of the Copenhagen summit, the IPCC was also rocked by the leaking of emails between some of its scientists that, according to sceptics, showed data had been skewed to mask contradictions about the evidence for man-made global warming.
The Copenhagen Accord has also come under heavy fire, with some critics already saying it has no future just over two months after it was hastily drafted to stave off a fiasco.
Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa urged countries to regain public trust by injecting greater urgency into negotiations ahead of the UN climate summit in November in Mexico.
"The initial sentiment after Copenhagen was one of gloom. Two months after, things are not as gloomy as they look," he said at the gathering in Nusa Dua.
"Many of the participants recognised there is a lack of confidence and a trust deficit after Copenhagen... To regain political momentum to restart the negotiations, the process must be open, transparent and inclusive".
Departing UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said the meeting in the Mexican resort of Cancun offered a huge opportunity to put the operational framework proposed in Copenhagen in place.
"Everybody was disappointed about the Copenhagen meeting's outcome but everybody wants to move forward," said de Boer.
"The Copenhagen Accord is a important political tool to invigorate the negotiations."
There were also pleas in Bali for more commitment from China and India on capping emissions, with their support seen as vital for a binding global accord.
The Copenhagen summit in December pledged to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) along with billions of dollars in financing.
But China and India, which are among the world's top emitters, failed to explicitly endorse the agreement.
"If we want to have a good outcome, we need China and India onboard," said Indonesia's Natalegawa.
Beijing's top climate change negotiator said it had no intention of capping greenhouse gas emissions for the time being, state media reported Thursday.
As an example of ways in which the Copenhagen agreement can be put into practice, French Ecology Minister Jean-Louis Borloo cited a meeting planned in Paris on preserving forests to combat pollution.
Countries with large tropical forests will meet March 11 to discuss a project that aims to make polluters pay to preserve forests.
"It will be the first post-Copenhagen Accord's application," he said.
In a message to the Bali meeting, UN chief Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday called for nations not to be swayed by the IPCC controversy.
"I urge you to reject the last ditch attempts by climate sceptics to derail your negotiations by exaggerating shortcomings on the IFCC Fourth Assessment Report," he said.
A perfect storm is brewing for the IPCC
The emerging errors of the IPCC's 2007 report are not incidental but fundamental, says Christopher Booker
Christopher Booker, The Telegraph 27 Feb 10;
The news from sunny Bali that there is to be an international investigation into the conduct of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri would have made front-page headlines a few weeks back. But while Scotland and North America are still swept by blizzards, in their worst winter for decades, there has been something of a lull in the global warming storm – after three months when the IPCC and Dr Pachauri were themselves battered by almost daily blizzards of new scandals and revelations. And one reason for this lull is that the real message of all the scandals has been lost.
The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC's last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other "extreme weather events" were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The "science is settled", the "consensus" is intact.
But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.
All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC's 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists. Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.
Furthermore, it has also emerged in almost every case that the decision to include these scare stories rather than hard scientific evidence was deliberate. As several IPCC scientists have pointed out about the scare over Himalayan glaciers, for instance, those responsible for including it were well aware that proper science said something quite different. But it was inserted nevertheless – because that was the story wanted by those in charge.
In addition, we can now read in shocking detail the truth of the outrageous efforts made to ensure that the same 2007 report was able to keep on board IPCC's most shameless stunt of all – the notorious "hockey stick" graph purporting to show that in the late 20th century, temperatures had been hurtling up to unprecedented levels. This was deemed necessary because, after the graph was made the centrepiece of the IPCC's 2001 report, it had been exposed as no more than a statistical illusion. (For a full account see Andrew Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion, and also my own book The Real Global Warming Disaster.)
In other words, in crucial respects the IPCC's 2007 report was no more than reckless propaganda, designed to panic the world's politicians into agreeing at Copenhagen in 2009 that we should all pay by far the largest single bill ever presented to the human race, amounting to tens of trillions of dollars. And as we know, faced with the prospect of this financial and economic abyss, December's Copenhagen conference ended in shambles, with virtually nothing agreed.
What is staggering is the speed and the scale of the unravelling – assisted of course, just before Copenhagen, by "Climategate", the emails and computer codes leaked from East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. Their significance was the light they shone on the activities of a small group of British and US scientists at the heart of the IPCC, as they discussed ways of manipulating data to show the world warming faster than the evidence justified; fighting off legitimate requests for data from outside experts to hide their manipulations; and conspiring to silence their critics by excluding their work from scientific journals and the IPCC's 2007 report itself. (Again, a devastating analysis of this story has just been published by Stephen Mosher and Tom Fuller in Climategate: The CRUtape Letters).
Almost as revealing as the leaked documents themselves, however, was the recent interview given to the BBC by the CRU's suspended director, Dr Phil Jones, who has played a central role in the global warming scare for 20 years, not least as custodian of the most prestigious of the four global temperature records relied on by the IPCC. In his interview Jones seemed to be chucking overboard one key prop of warmest faith after another, as he admitted that the world might have been hotter during the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years ago than it is today, that before any rise in CO2 levels temperatures rose faster between 1860 and 1880 than they have done in the past 30 years, and that in the past decade their trend has been falling rather than rising.
The implications of all this for the warming scare, as it has been presented to us over the past two decades, can scarcely be overestimated. The reputation of the IPCC is in shreds. And this is to say nothing of the personal reputation of the man who was the mastermind of its 2007 report, its chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri.
It was in this newspaper that we first revealed how Pachauri has earned millions of pounds for his Delhi-based research institute Teri, and further details are still emerging of how he has parlayed his position into a worldwide business empire, including 17 lucrative contracts from the EU alone. But we should not expect the truth to break in too suddenly on this mass of vested interests. Too many people have too much at stake to allow the faith in man-made global warming, which has sustained them so long and which is today making so many of them rich, to be abandoned. The so-called investigations into Climategate and Dr Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann seem like no more than empty establishment whitewashes. There is little reason to expect that the inquiry into the record of the IPCC and Dr Pachauri that is now being set up by the UN Environment Programme and the world's politicians will be very different.
Since 1988, when the greatest scare the world has seen got under way, hundreds of billions
of pounds have been poured into academic research projects designed not to test the CO2 warming thesis but to take it as a given fact, and to use computer models to make its impacts seem as scary as possible. The new global "carbon trading" market, already worth $126 billion a year, could soon be worth trillions. Governments, including our own, are calling for hundreds of billions more to be chucked into absurd "carbon-saving" energy schemes, with the cost to be met by all of us in soaring taxes and energy bills.
With all this mighty army of gullible politicians, dutiful officials, busy carbon traders, eager "renewables" developers and compliant, funding-hungry academics standing to benefit from the greatest perversion of the principles of true science the world has ever seen, who are we to protest that their emperor has no clothes? (How apt that that fairy tale should have been written in Copenhagen.) Let all that fluffy white "global warming" continue to fall from the skies, while people shiver in homes that, increasingly, they will find they can no longer afford to heat. We have called into being a true Frankenstein's monster. It will take a mighty long time to cut it down to size.
