UN begins review of its climate panel work
By IANSTuesday, March 9, 2010
UNITED NATIONS - UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has announced an independent review of its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that faced flak due to some wrong predictions in a report on the impact of global warming.
A comprehensive and independent revision of the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be carried out by InterAcademy Council, an international scientific organisation of the UN, Ban said Wednesday.
The Secretary-General admitted the existence of mistakes in the UN report on climate change and underlined the need of greater scientific rigour, transparency, precision and objectivity “to minimise potential errors”.
The IPCC, headed by Indian environmentalist Rajendra Pachauri, had claimed in its 2007 report that the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035.
A small number of mistakes were made in the IPCC report, a document that contains a 3,000-page summary of complex scientific data, said the UN chief, who was accompanied by the IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri, Prensa Latina reported.
Ban, however, defended the work of the panel saying that the threat of climate change remains as strong as ever.
Conclusions drawn by the IPCC experts are clear and ratify that climate is getting warmer beyond normal variables, with human activity contributing to the phenomenon due to polluting gas emissions, Ban said.
Questioning the work of the panel and exposing its errors do not change the scientists’ consensus about climate change, nor they minimise the IPCC work’s significance, he added.
