UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has announced 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 in February 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,” 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.”
Ban acknowledged there 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, 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 Pachauri, who has been resisting calls from critics for his resignation.
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 Pachauri nor Ban took questions from reporters.
Independent of, but not funded by, the UN
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.
Council co-chairman Robbert Dijkgraaf, a professor of mathematical physics at the University of Amsterdam, told reporters that the review would be entirely independent of the UN but would be funded by it. He added that the review panel would present its report by the end of August.
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 rigor 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,” Frumhoff said.
Ban hinted that some changes in the way the IPCC reports are compiled might be necessary to avoid future mistakes.
“We need to ensure full transparency, accuracy and objectivity, and minimise the potential for any errors going forward,” he said.
Surveys suggest public conviction of global warming’s risks may have been undermined by the errors and by the disclosure last year of hacked emails revealing scientists sniping at skeptics.
The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, and produces the main scientific document driving global efforts to agree to a more ambitious climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, and switch from fossil fuels to cleaner, low-carbon supplies of energy.
But its 2007 report wrongly said Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035, a prediction derived from articles which had not been reviewed by scientists before publication. An original source had spoken of the world’s glaciers melting by 2350.