U.N. Climate Panel Urged To Reform, Stick To Science

Louis Charbonneau PlanetArk 31 Aug 10;

The U.N. climate panel should make predictions only when it has solid evidence and should avoid policy advocacy, scientists said in a report on Monday that called for thorough reform of the body.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was widely criticized after admitting its 2007 global warming report wrongly said Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035 and that it overstated how much of the Netherlands is below sea level.

Such firm forecasts should be made "only when there is sufficient evidence," said a review group supported by the academies of science from the United States, Netherlands, Britain and around 100 other countries.

Critics of the idea of mandatory limits on so-called greenhouse gas emissions have said the IPCC errors show the science behind global warming is questionable.

The United Nations has been concerned that focusing only on errors by the panel, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore for work on global warming, could undermine the broader U.N. message that climate change is a real phenomenon requiring urgent action.

The report said the IPCC's mandate calls for it to be "policy relevant" without advocating specific policies. But some senior IPCC officials have been criticized for remarks that appeared to support specific policy approaches.

"Straying into advocacy can only hurt IPCC's credibility," the report said.

SHOULD HE STAY OR SHOULD HE GO?

The review said the limit of two six-year terms for the chair of the IPCC, currently Rajendra Pachauri of India, was too long and should be shortened to one term, as should the terms of other senior officials on the U.N. climate panel.

The report did not call for replacing Pachauri, the IPCC chairman since 2002. Asked if he would resign if requested to by the IPCC's 194 member states in October when they discuss the scientists' recommendations, Pachauri told reporters he would abide by any decision the U.N. climate panel made.

The report also called for an overhaul of the panel's management, including the creation of an executive committee that would include people from outside the IPCC.

The review touched on concerns about Pachauri's work as an adviser and board member for energy firms, as well as IPCC scientists reviewing their own work. The report noted the IPCC lacks a conflict of interest policy and recommended it adopt a "rigorous" one to avoid biases.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has acknowledged there were mistakes in what is known as the Fourth Assessment Report published in 2007, a document of more than 3,000 pages that cited more than 10,000 scientific papers. But he has insisted its fundamental conclusions were correct.

Ban's office issued a statement welcoming the review of the IPCC and reiterating he "firmly maintains that the fundamental science on climate change remains sound."

Harold Shapiro, a Princeton University professor and chair of the committee that reviewed the IPCC's work, told reporters one IPCC report "contains many statements that were assigned high confidence but for which there is little evidence."

Shapiro said the IPCC's response to errors when they were subsequently revealed was "slow and inadequate." The errors, he said, "did dent the credibility of the process."

Asked about the Himalayan glaciers error, Shapiro said: "In our judgment, it came from just not paying close enough attention to what (peer) reviewers said about that example."

Pachauri said the IPCC "will be strengthened by the (scientists') review and others of its kind this year."

But Shapiro made clear the review did not assess the validity of the science behind the IPCC reports, leaving open the possibility the panel could face a new wave of attacks from its critics.

The next IPCC report on climate change will be published in 2013 and 2014.

(Editing by Jerry Norton and John O'Callaghan)

FACTBOX-Errors, findings by UN panel of climate scientists
Reuters AlertNet 30 Aug 10;

Aug 30 (Reuters) - Experts will recommend reforms to the U.N. panel of climate scientists on Monday to avoid errors such as an exaggeration of the rate of melt of the Himalayas in a 2007 report.

The InterAcademy Council, comprising experts from national science academies, will hand a review to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York outlining ways to bolster the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The United Nations hopes the recommendations (1400 GMT) will restore confidence in climate science. Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Programme, said he would be surprised if the council urges a major overhaul of how the IPCC works. [ID:nLDE67S076]

Following is an overview of errors and overall findings in a 2007 IPCC report:

MISTAKES

In July, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency said it "found no errors that would undermine the main conclusions in the 2007 report" after a review. It urged more transparency about how conclusions were reached [ID:nLDE66415U].

It said the IPCC exaggerated the rate of melt of Himalayan glaciers by saying they could all vanish by 2035. The IPCC wrongly said that 55 percent of the Netherlands is below sea level -- the real figure is 26 percent. The IPCC projected that between 75 million and 250 million people in Africa are at risk of experiencing stress on water supplies by 2020 due to climate change -- the real range is between 90 and 220 million.

OVERALL FINDINGS IN 2007 IPCC REPORT

* OBSERVED CHANGES - "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal".

* CAUSES OF CHANGE - "Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in ... greenhouse gas concentrations" from human activities. ("Very likely" means at least 90 percent)

Annual greenhouse gas emissions from human activities have risen by 70 percent since 1970. Concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, far exceed the natural range over the last 650,000 years, it said.

* PROJECTED CLIMATE CHANGES - Temperatures are likely to rise by between 1.1 and 6.4 degrees Celsius (2.0 and 11.5 Fahrenheit) and sea levels by between 18 cm and 59 cm (7 inches and 23 inches) this century, without accounting for risks of an accelerated thaw of Greenland and Antarctica.

Africa, the Arctic, small islands and Asian mega-deltas are likely to be especially affected by climate change. Sea level rise "would continue for centuries" because of the momentum of warming even if greenhouse gas levels are stabilised.

"Warming could lead to some impacts that are abrupt or irreversible". About 20-30 percent of species will be at increasing risk of extinction if future temperature rises exceed 1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius.

* SOLUTIONS/COSTS - Governments have a wide range of tools -- higher taxes on emissions, regulations, tradeable permits and research. An effective carbon price could help cuts.

Emissions of greenhouse gases would have to peak by 2015 to limit global temperature rises to 2.0 to 2.4 degrees Celsius (3.6-4.3F) over pre-industrial times, the strictest goal assessed.

The costs of fighting warming will range from less than 0.12 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) per year for the most stringent scenarios until 2030 to less than 0.06 percent for a less tough goal. In the most costly case, that means a cumulative loss of GDP by 2030 of less than 3 percent.

(Editing by Charles Dick)

UN climate panel ordered to make fundamental reforms
Yahoo News 30 Aug 10;

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) – An international review panel on Monday called on the UN global climate change body to carry out fundamental reforms after embarrassing errors in a landmark report dented its credibility.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was caught in an international storm after it admitted its landmark 2007 report exaggerated the speed at which Himalayas glaciers were melting.

The review panel said the IPCC has been "successful overall" but called for leadership changes, stricter guidelines on source material and a check on conflicts of interest.

The five-month probe ordered by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the IPCC should have a stronger scientific basis for making its predictions and recommended an overhaul of the position of IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri.

The InterAcademy Council, which groups 15 leading science academies, was brought in after an uproar over the IPCC's 2007 study, which highlighted evidence that climate change was already hurting the planet.

In the run-up to a climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, the IPCC was rocked by a scandal involving leaked emails which critics say showed that they skewed data.

The mistake over the Himalayan glaciers -- a claim which was found to be sourced to a magazine article -- and an earlier error over how much of the Netherlands is below sea level also tainted the IPCC's image.

"I think the errors made did dent the credibility of the process -- there's no question about it," said Harold Shapiro, a former president of Princeton University who led the review.

"Trust is something you have to earn every year," he told reporters. "We think what we recommended will help."

The IPCC has admitted its mistakes but insisted its core conclusions about climate change are sound.

The review said the glacier reference showed the IPCC did not pay close enough attention to dissenting viewpoints.

"There were a number of reviewers who pointed out that this didn't seem quite right to them and that just was not followed through," Shapiro said.

The UN review said guidelines on source material for the IPCC were "too vague" and called for specific language, and enforcement, on what types of literature are unacceptable.

The review called for a new chief executive to run the IPCC and for the chairmanship to become a part-time post with a new holder for each landmark study carried out.

Pachauri, an Indian scientist primarily employed by the TERI think-tank, has come under criticism, with some arguing he had a vested interest due to his business dealings with carbon trading companies. He has strongly denied any conflict of interest however.

Pachauri told a press conference after the report that he would let member-states decide his future. The 194 nation IPCC is to hold a general meeting in Busan, South Korea in October.

The IPCC chairman criticized what he called "ideologically driven posturing" in the attacks on the climate group, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore.

Ban said the review had in no way weakened the strength of basic climate science but he said nations had to act on the recommendations.

"Given the gravity of the climate challenge, the secretary general believes it is vital that the world receives the best possible climate assessments through an IPCC that operates at the highest levels of professionalism, objectivity, responsiveness and transparency," his spokesman said in a statement.

In Brussels, European Climate Action Commissioner Connie Hedegaard also said that "after all the fights" the main findings of the 2007 report are "still unchallenged."

"The bottom line, and this report says it, is that overall the IPCC has done a very good job, but there were some minor errors and they were corrected," she told AFP.

Environmental group Greenpeace pointed to severe weather this year -- including Pakistan's flood disaster and Russia's worst-ever heat wave -- as new evidence of global warming.

"Despite the muckraking and crude attempts to undermine the findings of the IPCC, the scientific consensus is clear, climate change represents a serious threat to the future of the environment and humanity," Greenpeace said.

Report: Climate science panel needs change at top
Seth Borenstein, Associated Press Yahoo News 30 Aug 10;

WASHINGTON – Scientists reviewing the acclaimed but beleaguered international climate change panel called Monday for a major overhaul in the way it's run, but stopped short of calling for the ouster of the current leader.

The independent review of the U.N. climate panel puts new pressure on chairman Rajendra Pachauri, who has been criticized for possible conflicts of interest, but shows no sign of stepping down.

"It's hard to see how the United Nations can both follow the advice of this committee and keep Rajendra Pachauri on board as head," said Roger Pielke Jr., a frequent critic of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The University of Colorado professor praised the review findings as a way of saving the climate panel with "tough love."

The InterAcademy Council, a collection of the world's science academies, outlined a series of "significant reforms" in management structure needed by the IPCC, a body that won a Nobel Prize with former Vice President Al Gore in 2007.

Last year, a batch of errors embarrassed the authors of the climate report. Among the most prominent were misleading statements about glaciers in the Himalayas. The IPCC incorrectly said they were melting faster than others and that they would disappear by 2035 — hundreds of years earlier than other information suggests.

"Those errors did dent the credibility of the process, no question about it," said former Princeton University president Harold Shapiro, who led the review of the IPCC.

Climate change science took a parade of public hits last winter, starting with the release of hacked e-mails from a British climate center. Then there was the failure of a summit in Copenhagen to come up with mandatory greenhouse gas pollution limits, followed by the mistakes discovered in the IPCC report. On top of that, the winter seemed unusually cold in many places, undercutting belief in global warming.

The mood seems different now. Several outside reports — including those by the British, Dutch and American governments — have upheld the chief scientific finding of the climate panel: that global warming is man-made and incontrovertible. This year, so far, is on target to be the hottest on record worldwide with a number of extreme weather events.

IPCC chief Pachauri, an academic from India who also is a professor at Yale, said many of the recommendations outlined are steps he already has started. Critics, including those in the U.S. Senate, have called on him to resign, but on Monday he gave no indication he would.

"This has nothing to do with personalities," Pachauri told The Associated Press. "I think we're jumping the gun if we're talking about taking any action before the IPCC takes a look at the report."

Shapiro said if fundamental changes are made, the IPCC — created in 1989 by the United Nations and World Meteorological Organization — can regain its credibility. The IPCC involves scientists mostly volunteering work with only 10 staffers, and even Pachauri is a part-time volunteer.

The 113-page review was requested by the IPCC and the U.N. after the errors were found. It didn't study the quality of the science itself, although Shapiro said the key recommendations in the climate report "are well supported by the scientific evidence."

Still, he said the way the report expressed confidence in scientific findings was incomplete and at times even misleading. In the panel's first report, which addresses the physical causes of global warming, scientists may have underestimated how confident they were in their conclusions, Shapiro said. In the second report, about the effects on daily life, in at least one instance they may have overestimated the scientific backing for their conclusions, he suggested.

The InterAcademy Council said the climate change group overall has done a good job. But the council said it needs a full-time executive director, more openness and regular changes in leadership. It also called for stronger enforcement of its reviews of research and adoption of a conflict of interest policy, which the IPCC does not have, even though its parent agencies do. The conflict of interest issue was raised because of Pachauri's work as adviser and board member of green energy companies.

Pachauri said he has been cleared of any conflict claims, especially since he gave away all the money he was paid to sit on companies' boards.

Scientists who have been among the IPCC authors praised the study. Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria in Canada said the recommended changes include some that scientists have urged, but he doesn't see these changes as being major.

Weaver said the focus on IPCC structure misses the point when it comes to global warming: "The Titanic is sinking and we're arguing about the nature of the deck chairs."

Achim Steiner, the executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, said the review would help the IPCC recover some of the credibility it lost when it came under a "concerted effort" to attack its integrity.

Steiner said in a telephone interview said the new report restores "in the public mind a level of confidence which is critical for the IPCC's work to be used as a basis for international negotiations and policy making."

Associated Press writers Edith Lederer in New York and Frank Jordans in Geneva contributed to this report

Online:

The InterAcademy Council's review: http://reviewipcc.interacademycouncil.net/

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: http://www.ipcc.ch/

Stricter controls urged for the UN's climate body
Paul Rincon BBC News 30 Aug 10;

The UN's climate science body needs stricter checks to prevent damage to the organisation's credibility, an independent review has concluded.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has faced mounting pressure over errors in its last major assessment of climate science in 2007.

The review said guidelines were needed to ensure IPCC leaders were not seen as advocating specific climate policies.

It also urges transparency and suggests changes to the management of the body.

The IPCC has admitted it made a mistake in its 2007 assessment in asserting that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. But it says this error did not change the broad picture of man-made climate change.

The review committee stressed that previous IPCC science assessments had been successful overall, but it said the body's response to revelations of errors in its 2007 report had been "slow and inadequate".

Critics have previously called on the IPCC's chair, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, to resign. Responding to the report, Dr Pachauri said he wanted to stay to implement changes at the organisation.

He stressed that none of the reviews set up in the wake of recent climate controversies found flaws with the fundamental science of climate change.

In the past year, climate science and political negotiations aimed at dealing with global warming, such as the Copenhagen summit, have come under unprecedented scrutiny.

In February, the UN panel suggested setting up an independent review, feeling that its 20-year-old rules might need an overhaul. It was overseen by the Inter-Academy Council (IAC), an international umbrella body for science academies.

There was also a sense the UN body might have been ill-equipped to handle the attention in the wake of "Glaciergate" and the release of e-mails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the the University of East Anglia, UK.

The e-mails issue came to light in November last year, when hundreds of messages between CRU scientists and their peers around the world were posted on the internet, along with other documents.

Critics said the e-mail exchanges revealed an attempt by the researchers to manipulate data and three independent reviews were initiated into the affair.

This review of the IPCC's workings was released at a news conference in New York on Monday. Among the committee's recommendations was that the UN body should appoint an executive director to handle day-to-day operations and speak on behalf of the panel.

It also said the current limit of two six-year terms for the chair of the organisation was too long.

The report favoured the post of IPCC chair and that of the executive director being limited to the term of one climate science assessment.

Dr Pachauri became head of the organisation in 2002 and was re-elected for his second term in 2008.

A conflict of interest charge has also been levelled at Dr Pachauri over his business interests. The IPCC chair has vigorously defended himself over these charges, but the report said the UN organisation needed a robust conflict of interest policy.

Speaking in New York, Harold Shapiro, who led the IAC review, said that although the IPCC's assessment process had "served society well", fundamental changes would help the IPCC continue to perform successfully under a "public microscope".

Dr Shapiro conceded that controversy over errors in climate science assessments had dented the credibility of the process.
'Slow' response

The IAC report concentrates on review processes at the UN body, including the use of non-peer reviewed sources, and quality control on data.

It said the IPCC should establish an executive committee that could include individuals from outside the climate science community in order to enhance credibility and independence.

The IAC committee said processes used by the UN panel to review material in its assessment reports were thorough.

But it said procedures needed tightening to minimise errors. And the IAC urged editors to ensure genuine controversies were reflected and alternative views were accounted for.

Speaking to the BBC, Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a "sceptical" climate think-tank, welcomed the recommendations, but added: "We really want the IPCC to accept these recommendations and implement them not in 2015, but now. Otherwise, their next report will not be credible."

Mike Hulme, professor of climate science at the University of East Anglia, called the reforms radical and far-reaching.

"If the recommendations are fully implemented, the way the IPCC reports and communicates its findings will be very different in future," he told the BBC.

The IAC says part of the IPCC 2007 report contained statements that were based on little evidence, and urges IPCC authors to make future projections only when there is sufficient support for them.

The use by the IPCC of so-called "grey literature" - that which has not been peer-reviewed or published in scientific journals - has sparked controversy, partly because this type of material was behind the glacier error.

The committee said such literature was often appropriate for inclusion in the IPCC's assessment reports. But it said authors needed to follow the IPCC's guidelines more closely and that the guidelines themselves were too vague.

The report's recommendations are likely to be considered at the IPCC's next plenary meeting in South Korea in October.