THE PUBLIC should be reassured by a report criticising the UN body charged with collecting scientific evidence about climate change, Irish commentators have said.
UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon released a negative report on the International Panel on Climate Change on Monday. It highlighted past high-profile failures within the panel’s systems that allowed untested claims to be included in its reports as scientific fact. This has caused damage to the panel’s credibility and encouraged climate change sceptics who used the errors to heighten public doubt about the reality of climate change triggered by human activity.
It was essential that the public be made fully aware of the report, which only looked at panel procedures and did not raise any doubts about the scientific findings behind climate change, said Prof Colin O’Dowd, NUI Galway professor of physics and director of the university’s Centre for Climate and Air Pollution Studies.
They have to get this message to the public, he said. “It has to, that is a very important step to returning confidence in the process. The sceptics had a major propaganda advantage over the past year.”
The scientific results were safe. They involved a large number of academics who reached agreement on the findings. “To get all of them to reach a consensus, that this is a major economic and social problem caused by climate change, that is a big achievement,” Prof O’Dowd said yesterday. “The rapid acceptance would never be agreed on dodgy science.”
Doubts raised by the sceptics were valuable because they improved the science itself, said Dr Rowan Fealy of Icarus, the Irish Climate Analysis and Research Units at NUI Maynooth. “While some sceptics want to confuse the issues, the scientific community has been remiss in informing the public about the lack of certainty in this. We have in fact let ourselves down,” he said. “We tend to underplay the uncertainty within our climate models,” he added.“Sceptics hold a mirror up to us and we have to come back with more evidence.”
The report’s call for a major reorganisation of the Panel was welcomed by Prof Ray Bates, professor of Meteorology in the School of Mathematical Sciences at University College Dublin.
“I think things should improve. If they can get the scientists more behind the process it would benefit,” he added. Scientists from 15 national academies of science prepared the report.