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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 that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC)
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 (IAC)
to conduct an independent review of the panel and its structures.
It published its review
last week 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 that 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 that 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, 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 emails 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.
Source - The Irish Times
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