News | Climate Change

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's announcement over the weekend that it will seek independent experts to investigate how factual errors were published in its latest report is a key aspect of the organization's effort to understand and divulge its institutional problems, officials there say.

The announcement by the United Nations-sponsored organization Saturday comes as it gears up to produce another big report on global warming.
The IPCC, which won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for a report that called climate change "unequivocal" and "very likely" caused by human activity, now says it will ask a committee of independent experts to assess why the report contained some factual errors, and to make recommendations as to how the IPCC can prevent such mistakes in the future.
Among the incidents that have cast doubt on the organization's credibility: More than 1,000 emails hacked from an influential U.K. climate-research lab whose research has figured in IPCC reports suggested that scientists there were trying to squelch other researchers who challenged research linking climate change with human activity; and the IPCC expressed "regret" last month that its 2007 report erroneously claimed that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.
"We know that there were some problems" with the IPCC's 2007 report, which ran to about 3,000 pages, said Chris Field, a scientist and a leader of the IPCC's next report, due out in 2013 and 2014, in an interview on Sunday. "All the evidence so far is that the problems were relatively minor, but there were problems."
Some scientists who have long criticized the IPCC said an independent review won't be enough to fix what they see as systemic problems in the process by which the IPCC produces voluminous climate-science reports every five or six years.
"The IPCC has had 20 years in this and has become entrenched with a particular view of climate change," said John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He said IPCC reports end up minimizing discussion of dissenting views, a situation he attributes in part to the fact that national governments are involved in selecting which scientists will help write IPCC reports.
Mr. Field said the process by which scientists are chosen to help write IPCC reports "provides a balanced reflection of what's in the scientific literature. If one individual brings strong opinions one way or the other, the process is designed to keep those out."
IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri said in a statement Saturday that the IPCC hopes to have the details of the independent probe figured out by early March. He said IPCC leaders stand firmly behind the "rigour and robustness" of the 2007 report, whose "key conclusions are based on an overwhelming body of evidence from thousands of peer-reviewed and independent scientific studies." But, he said, they "recognize the criticism that has been leveled at us, and the need to respond."
The IPCC's review is likely to be done by a group of respected scientists from various countries, though who will conduct it is still being worked out, said Mr. Field, director of the Carnegie Institution for Science's department of global ecology, in Stanford, Calif. Among the options IPCC leaders are discussing is asking either an international scientific body or a handful of national scientific groups to conduct the review, he said.
"We're going to be incredibly open and quick in releasing further information as it becomes available," Mr. Field said.
The IPCC's 2007 report helped push climate change to the top of the political agenda in much of the world, including in the U.S., where it intensified discussion in Washington about potential legislation to cap greenhouse-gas emissions. But since late last year, several revelations have raised questions about the IPCC's objectiveness and accuracy in producing its reports. In addition to the questions raised by the hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the U.K., and by the 2007 report's Himalayan glacier error, the 2007 report also said that about half of the Netherlands sits below sea level, which Mr. Field said is an error. That error would appear to overstate concern about flooding in the Netherlands. In fact, the portion of the Netherlands below sea level is lower, Mr. Field said; about half the country is believed at risk for flooding.
An important part of the independent review, Mr. Field said, will be coming up with a way for the IPCC to quickly and accurately correct errors in its reports—a procedure it now lacks.