Climate change panel told to reform

THE international body set up to study global warming needs major changes in the way it is run following a series of high-profile mistakes, a report said yesterday.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) needs to ensure it can handle more complex assessments of global warming and intense public scrutiny, the report found.

Its work has come under fire in recent months after revelations of inaccuracies in the last assessment of global warming provided to governments in 2007 – for which it won the Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore.

The mistakes, including a claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035, prompted a review of the IPCC’s processes and procedures by the InterAcademy Council (IAC), an organisation of the world’s science bodies.

It found the IPCC had been successful overall in delivering its reports, but called for fundamental reforms to its management structure and a strengthening of its procedures.

Harold Shapiro, chairman of the committee that wrote the report, 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.”

The IPCC needed to be as transparent as possible in how it worked, how it selected people to participate in assessments and its choice of scientific information to assess, the IAC said.

The council’s report said the process by which the IPCC examines the known information and scientific work on climate change and its impacts, and delivers reports to governments to help them shape policy was “thorough”.

But stronger enforcement of the procedures laid down for the reports’ authors could reduce mistakes, the IAC study suggested, while specific guidelines were needed over the controversial use of “grey literature” which has not been published or peer-reviewed by other scientists.

The errors in the IPCC report emerged as climate science weathered a sustained attack on its credibility when emails hacked from a key British research centre were seized upon by sceptics who claimed they showed scientists were manipulating data to back up a theory of global warming.

Three reviews of the emails and the science produced by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit cleared the researchers of altering or suppressing data.