Probe urges deep changes in UN climate panel's working methods

By JT Nguyen Aug 30, 2010, 19:35 GMT

New York - A United Nations-mandated probe Monday called for 'fundamental reform' of a climate change panel, including overhauling its management structure and strengthening its working procedures.

The probe carried out by the Amsterdam-based InterAcademy Council (IAC) said reforming the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) would help it to handle the 'ever larger and increasingly complex climate assessments.'

IAC's recommendations include a call for a strong leadership in IPCC, the establishment of an executive committee and an executive director to lead the panel's secretariat and handle day-to-day operations.

The panel also urged the tenure of the IPCC chairman to be limited to one term rather than the current two six year-terms.

IPCC has issued four assessments on the world's climate in the past two decades, with each assessment requiring years of research and study involving thousands of scientists around the world. But the scientists worked part-time while the IPCC chairman has a fixed term.

The panel is now headed by Rajendra Pachauri, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 with former US Vice President Al Gore. Pachauri has rejected calls to resign after the panel was criticized for making claims that were not backed by science.

'Operating under the public microscope the way IPCC does require strong leadership, the continued and enthusiastic participation of distinguished scientists, an ability to adapt, and a commitment to openness if the value of these assessments to society is to be maintained,' said Harold Shapiro, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, who chaired the IAC probe.

The IAC was asked in March to conduct the review of IPCC by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Pachauri to stop the waves of criticism and the panel's loss of credibility.

It released its findings and recommendations at a news conference at UN headquarters in New York.

IPCC said in its most recent assessment of climate change that global warming resulted from human activity. But its claims that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035, that climate change could destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon and that agricultural yields in some African countries could be halved in a decade were strongly denounced as lacking in evidence.

The attacks against IPCC became world headlines last November when thousands of email exchanges among climate scientists were hacked from a computer server of a research center at the University of East Anglia in Britain.

The hacked emails seemed to strengthen the critics' position, and their public charges against the IPCC scientists spawned a new concept for the controversy: 'climategate.'

IAC, which is an umbrella organization of the world's science academies hosted by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science in Amsterdam, said it accepted the request for the probe in part because of the revelation of errors in the IPCC' last assessment.

It concluded that the 'process is thorough, but stronger enforcement of existing IPCC's review procedures could minimize the number of errors.'

It said errors in assessments were made because their authors failed to follow IPCC's guidelines for evaluating the sources of claims and also because the guidelines were vague. It said IPCC was slow and responded inadequately to revelations of errors in the last assessment.

It called for quality of the assessment process and of 'leadership at all levels.' It called for transparency in detailing the processes of making assessments, 'particularly its criteria for selecting participants and the type of scientific and technological information to be assessed.'

The IPCC assessment in 2007 provoked anger and criticism from many business organizations and political conservatives, who disagreed that global warming was occurring and/or disputed that human activity was at fault.

But IPCC has its defenders, too. In the wake of strong criticism, five independent studies were made between November and July this year by universities in the United States as well as Britain, which came to the defence of the IPCC findings that put the blame on carbon emissions stemming from human activity.

Britain's House of Commons' Science and Technologies Committee and Washington's Environmental Protection Administration also defended the IPCC findings.

The Pennsylvania State University cleared one of its scientists whose emails were hacked of accusations that he had contributed to faulty science.

In May, the US National Academy of Sciences reaffirmed that 'scientific evidence that the earth is warming is now overwhelming' and that it is 'most likely' caused by human activities.