Reaffirmation of the scientific basis for human-induced global warming must be achieved before the Mexico climate summit
THREE YEARS ago, a beaming Dr Rajendra Pachauri stood shoulder-to-shoulder in Oslo with former US vice-president Al Gore as they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – Gore for his hard-hitting film, An Inconvenient Truth, and Pachauri for the work done by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The 69-year-old Indian scientist could scarcely have imagined that he would find himself in the eye of a storm over revelations that the IPCC’s prediction in its landmark Fourth Assessment Report (2007) of the meltdown of Himalayan glaciers as early as 2035 was based on an unscientific paper compiled by the World Wildlife Fund.
Coming so soon after so-called Climategate – the term used by sceptics and deniers to characterise what was unearthed in e-mails hacked from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit – this embarrassing admission further undermined confidence in the scientific basis for human-induced, potentially disastrous global warming.
Pachauri's refusal to apologise for the "human error" in getting it wrong (the Himalayan glaciers are melting, but not quite as fast as the IPCC suggested) compounded the problem. To do so, he told the Guardiannewspaper in February, would be hypocritical. "You can't expect me to be personally responsible for every word in a 3,000-page report," he said.
Although he conceded that the glacier mistake “has certainly cost us dear”, Pachauri called on the IPCC’s critics to look at its conclusion that there is “unequivocal” evidence for global warming. “The larger picture is solid, it’s convincing, and it’s extremely important. How can we lose sight of what climate change is going to do to this planet?” he asked.
Under fire as never before, the IPCC proposed there should be an independent review of its working practices, an idea endorsed by governments, and in March UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon commissioned the Inter Academy Council – a body representing national science academies such as Britain’s Royal Society – to carry it out.
The council set up a 12-member review panel, chaired by US economist Prof Harold Shapiro, a former president of Princeton University and adviser to Bill Clinton. “We’re a neutral body,” he told the BBC. “Most of us have never participated in the IPCC, but all of us have been part of organisations where quality control is an issue.” The review, which got under way in Amsterdam last Friday, will concentrate on the IPCC’s processes and procedures. “We will not have time to hear from every critic of the IPCC,” Prof Shapiro said. But the panel “definitely want to hear . . . from ‘thoughtful critics’ – very, very respectable and highly thought-of scientists with criticisms of the organisation”.
It will focus on the IPCC’s use of “grey literature”, which is not peer-reviewed by scientists – such as WWF’s work on Himalayan glaciers.
“The media and several other people have completely misunderstood the need for using non peer-reviewed literature,” Pachauri said – by suggesting it was “grey muddied water flowing down the drains”.
At the review panel’s first public session, he said the “grey literature” included reports from the International Energy Agency, the OECD, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, the World Bank and “some highly prestigious NGOs [non-governmental organisations] that are doing detailed academic work, and you cannot ignore this”.
The panel’s vice-chair, Prof Roseanne Diab, who is executive officer of the South African Academy of Science, made it clear that they “won’t be looking at the science, but at the processes that led to the IPCC’s findings . . . and how they can be improved, if necessary”. This is a perfectly reasonable position; otherwise, its work would be impossible.
It must be emphasised that experts from more than 130 countries contributed to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report over a period of six years; they included more than 2,500 scientific reviewers, 800 contributing writers and 450 lead authors. Work has already started on the Fifth Assessment Report, which is due to be completed in 2014.
The review panel is expected to finish its work by the end of August, after which it will be peer-reviewed for an IPCC meeting in October – two months ahead of the next UN climate change summit in Mexico. Preparations for that conference, which will pick up the pieces from Copenhagen, include another round of talks in Bonn next month.
Re-establishing the IPCC’s credibility is absolutely critical to restoring public confidence – and to making progress in these highly complex negotiations, earlier rather than later. Of course, it will be impossible to satisfy the sceptics and deniers, such as “Politkeren”, who responded to my column on the Washington-based Heritage Foundation as follows: “Jerk! It’s only left-wing journalists and the IPCC who still believes (sic) in the global warming scam. Or try to make money by spreading the propaganda.” This is typical of the vulgar abuse frequently hurled nowadays by those who persist in denying there is any basis at all for the findings of so many scientists from all over the world.
They made hay with Climategate in a blatant effort to undermine the Copenhagen climate summit, and then dismissed as whitewash the conclusion last month by an independent panel, appointed by the University of East Anglia, that there was “no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work” by its Climatic Research Unit.
We can expect them to react similarly to the findings of Prof Shapiro’s review of the IPCC – and to this opinion column.