UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said yesterday that a group of national science academies would review UN climate science to restore trust after a 2007 global warming report was found to have errors.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change acknowledged in January its report had exaggerated the pace of Himalayan glaciers melting, and last month said the report also had overstated how much of the Netherlands is below sea level.
“Let me be clear – the threat posed by climate change is real,” Mr Ban told reporters alongside panel chairman Rajendra Pachauri. “Nothing that has been alleged or revealed in the media recently alters the fundamental scientific consensus on climate change.” Mr Ban acknowledged that were “a very small number of errors” in what is known as the Fourth Assessment Report published in 2007, a document of more than 3,000 pages that cited over 10,000 scientific papers. The next such report on climate change will be published in 2013 and 2014.
Despite the errors, Mr Pachauri told reporters he stood by the 2007 report’s principle message that global warming is real and is accelerating due to so-called greenhouse gas emissions.
“We believe the conclusions of that report are really beyond any reasonable doubt,” said Mr Pachauri, who has been resisting calls from critics for his resignation.
Mr Ban said the InterAcademy Council, a grouping of the world’s science academies, would lead the review, which he promised would be “conducted completely independently of the United Nations”. Neither Mr Pachauri nor Mr Ban took questions from reporters.
The InterAcademy Council is hosted by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam and includes Britain’s Royal Society, and more than a dozen other national science academies.
Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists and a lead author of the 2007 report, said the review was “the right move”.
“If this independent review is carried out with rigour and transparency, it will help strengthen the IPCC’s commitment to robust scientific assessments and restore public confidence that has been shaken by an aggressive campaign to sow confusion about climate science,” Mr Frumhoff said.
Mr also Ban hinted that some changes in the way the IPCC reports are compiled might be necessary to avoid future mistakes. – (Reuters)