30 Aug 2010

Report calls for climate body overhaul

The international body on the threat of climate change needs fundamental reform in the wake of a number of embarrassing mistakes, according to an independent review writes Tom Clarke.

IPCC criticism

Despite calls for a change in leadership of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), its chair, Indian scientist Rajendra Pachauri, said today that he wouldn’t be leaving immediately.

The IPCC came under intense criticism in January when a number of errors were found in the body’s most recent 2007 report. It stated, wrongly, that Himalayan glaciers could have disappeared completely by 2035.

The report also included evidence from news magazines and environmental NGOs that aren’t subject to stringent peer-review.

Elsewhere the 2007 report repeated an erroneous figure from the Dutch government that stated 55 per cent of the Netherlands is below sea level, when the actual figure is 23 per cent.

Speaking at a press conference at UN headquarters in New York, the review’s chairman Professor Harold Shapiro of Princeton University said: “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.”

But the review, carried out by the world science body the Inter-Academy Council, stopped short of calling for the IPPC chair to step down.

Dr Pachauri came under intense criticism earlier this year when the report errors first emerged. Allegations of conflict of interest relating to Dr Pachauri were also raised. Since taking over as chair of the IPCC in 2002 Pachauri continued to raise money for his privately funded research institute in New Delhi.

Today, Dr Pachauri welcomed the findings of the report, stating: “The IPCC will be strengthened by the IAC review and by others of its kind this year… we’re now pleased to receive recommendations on how to further strengthen our own policies and procedures.”

The review recommends that the management team of the IPCC should only remain for the period of each four-year report cycle. Dr Pachauri has served for two.

“I am a servant of the IPCC and I will abide by any decision that the IPCC takes, that’s my responsibility and that’s my duty. But my mandate makes it very, very clear that I have to complete the 5th assessment process,” he said, referring to the next report by the panel, due in 2013.

The review wasn’t tasked with picking over the science contained in the IPCC’s reports, but concluded that it found no procedural problems that would call into question the IPCC’s main scientific conclusions and it praised the IPCC’s work in informing policymakers about the threat of climate change.

However the five-month probe recommended that the panel stick to the science of climate change and steer away from policy recommendations. It identified problems with the balance of evidence included in the report, calling for reference to contradictory evidence to be included. It also criticised the way different teams of scientists writing in the report used different ways of communicating risks of climate change.

“Qualitative probabilities should be used to describe the probability of well-defined outcomes only when there is sufficient evidence,” said the review group.

British climate scientist and IPCC author Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University, said many of the recommendations were sensible, but may be hard to implement practically. “Whenever things get technical, there are going to be disagreements among scientists,” he said.

But Allen added that the IPCC depends on recruiting scientists to lend their time and expertise for free to compile a consensus of climate change science every four years. Unless the IPCC scale down the size of each report – they currently run to 3000 pages – increasing bureaucracy could make IPCC reports impossible to deliver.

“There is a real danger, if they make the process even more burdensome on individual scientists and still expect us to do it for free, that the only people prepared to serve the IPCC in the future will either be scientists whose own research isn’t going very well or, worse, those with an axe to grind,” Allen said.