Faulted UN climate panel urged to overhaul working methods (Roundup)

By JT Nguyen Aug 31, 2010, 10:49 GMT

   New York - A United Nations-mandated probe Monday called for 'fundamental reform' of a controversial 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.'

But IAC's wide-ranging recommendations for changes did not question key findings by IPCC scientists about climate change, particularly the assessment that human activities were responsible for global warming.

The IAC released its findings and recommendations at UN headquarters in New York.

A key issue in the debate is whether human activity - the production of carbon emissions by burning coal and oil - has caused global warming, and environmentalists breathed easier after learning that the investigators did not find fault with that finding.

In Washington, Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources Institute said the findings would 'help bolster confidence in the IPCC' and 'ensure that the IPCC continues to be a leading source of scientific information on climate change.'

She noted that the US National Academy of Sciences also supports the conclusion.

'Around the world, we are witnessing the types of events consistent with climate models - from wildfires in Russia to massive flooding in Pakistan - that will become even more frequent if we do not take action to reduce climate change,' Morgan said.

The governments of the two major producers of carbon emissions - China and US - have drug their feet over measures to reduce them. The US argues that the Kyoto Protocol, which is intended to make signatories lower their emissions, favours developing countries and gives them an unfair trade advantage.

Greenpeace said in Brussels that IAC's recommendations would help to streamline IPCC's work and help make 'the science of climate change and the implications of continued fossil-fuel use and deforestation more understandable to the general public.'

In its probe, the Dutch-based group called for the climate-change panel to have strong leadership, to establish an executive committee and to appoint 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 reconsidered after every term, rather than continue with the current two six-year-term assignments.

IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 with former US Vice President Al Gore, said he seriously welcomed the recommendations and will ask the 194-government IPCC to discuss how to implement them.

'We were eager for a thorough examination,' Pachauri said. 'Our credibility had been challenged, and we realized from the outset that only an exhaustive, impartial and independent review would be acceptable.'

Pachauri repeated past 'regrets' for a claim that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 because of global warming, adding: 'We stick with our regrets.'

The IPCC also raised eyebrows with its claim 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.

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

Ban, who called for the review, said he stands 'firmly' behind the assessment that human activities caused global warming.

Thousands of scientists worked part time over many years producing each of the four reports issued in the past two decades.

'Operating under the public microscope the way IPCC does requires 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 attacks against IPCC - known as 'climategate' - 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.

The IAC, which is an umbrella organization of the world's science academics 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's last assessment.

   It said errors in assessments were made because authors failed to follow 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 also called for transparency in detailing how the studies are done, 'particularly its criteria for selecting participants and the type of scientific and technological information to be assessed.'