AN INTERNATIONAL scientific group has issued a highly critical report on the workings of the UN body charged with assembling scientific evidence about global warming.
The report warns the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change must “fundamentally change” its management structures. It must also stick to the science and not stray into “advocacy” in support of the view that climate change is driven by human activity.
The panel received a Nobel prize in 2007 for its work in collating international research into the causes of global warming. Its credibility was damaged, however, by a series of embarrassing failures over the past two years, including the acceptance as scientific fact of completely unsubstantiated claims about the effects caused by climate change.
Climate change sceptics immediately pounced on the errors, using them to raise doubts about all of the science behind human-induced climate change.
As a result, the UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon last March requested the Amsterdam-based InterAcademy Council to conduct an independent review of the panel and its structures. It published its review yesterday and recommended sweeping changes to the panel and how it conducts its business.
It called for an overhaul of the panel’s management, including the appointment of an executive director and an executive committee. These should include members who are not part of the panel and not involved in climate science, the report said.
The panel should avoid policy advocacy, it said: “Straying into advocacy can only hurt IPCC’s credibility.”
The review also said the panel should reduce the limit of two six-year terms for its chairman, saying it was too long and should be no more than a single term. The current chairman, Rajendra Pachauri of India, has held his position since 2002 and told reporters yesterday he would accept any decision the panel made on his continued role.
The review also called for full enforcement of the panel’s scientific review procedures to protect against future mistakes with scientific data.
The InterAcademy Council is made up of some of the world’s leading scientists and is independent of both the UN and the panel itself. The UN’s Environment Programme (UNEP) which oversees the panel hopes that the review will go some way towards reviving confidence in the panel.
The programme’s executive director Achim Steiner welcomed the review, saying in a statement it re- affirmed the integrity, importance and validity of the IPCC’s work.
He highlighted the fact that the review did not look at the science but only at procedures and management within the panel. The scientific findings published by the panel remained “unaffected” – the same findings that led the panel to conclude in its last report, with 90 per cent certainty, that human activity was driving climate change.
The panel’s response to errors when revealed was “slow and inadequate”, according to the chairman of the review group, Princeton university’s Prof Harold Shapiro.
Greenpeace, in a response yesterday, said the scientific consensus was clear climate change represented a serious threat to humanity. This was despite the “muckraking” and attempts to undermine the panel.
“My reaction is very positive,” said University College Dublin’s professor of meteorology, Prof Ray Bates. He believed it would help win back public confidence in the panel and its work.
The panel’s failures have caused ongoing problems for those who argue in favour of human-induced climate change. One involved the publishing of untested scientific claims in the panel’s reports on the expected disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035.
Another was the leaking of e-mails from the important University of East Anglia climatic research unit that seemed to cast doubt on the validity of scientific claims about human-induced climate change.
These and other failings have served to encourage climate-change sceptics, who deny there is scientific evidence to back human involvement in global warming.
It has also caused widespread doubt and confusion among the public arising from the contradictory claims made by the two sides.