IPCC takes heat in climate controversy
Science proved very vulnerable in recent weeks as the UN's climate change panel came under fire.
The chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, accepted the Nobel peace prize on behalf of the panel only two years ago. Now people have been calling for his immediate resignation. Errors have been discovered in the IPCC's report, regarding the melting of Himalayan glaciers and how much of the Netherlands lies below sea level. A scandal over hacked emails in England shook the credibility of important authors of the report. And it has come to light that Pachauri runs an institute in New Delhi which makes money giving advice on climate issues.
The IPCC is not an institute, but a panel founded in 1988 by national
governments to periodically collect existing knowledge about climate change.
It operates under the UN's organisations for meteorology (WMO) and for the
environment (UNEP), and only has a tiny support staff at the WMO in Geneva.
Its task is to collect and evaluate scientific literature about the
greenhouse effect and climate change and answer the question: is the earth
really heating up and is man to blame for it? A second assignment is to
predict consequences and possible solutions. Finally, it is charged with
thinking about ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The IPCC is not
mandated to carry out its own research or revise the numbers in existing
data.
In the course of four assessments (1990, 1995, 2001 and 2007), the IPCC has become more confident about rises in the earth’s temperature and mankind's role in that development. Less certainty has been reached concerning possible secondary effects such as rising sea levels or whether parts of the earth might become more arid. However, its opponents are gaining ground. They are currently even using the harsh winter that has taken hold of Europe to ridicule the UN climate panel. “How can it be this cold if the earth is heating up?” sceptics ask.
Two erroneous excerpts in 980 pages
They ignore that global warming is measured by the average temperature of the near-surface air around the entire planet for a year, or at least by hemisphere. The 2009/2010 winter may be cold in Europe, but that doesn 't mean the annual average for the northern hemisphere will be lower. Reports of extreme cold that usually come out of the US this time of year have been absent. It is significant that the Arctic ocean ice cover has never been this small in February as it is this year.
Critics of former US vice-president Al Gore, who shared the 2007 Nobel peace
prize with the IPCC, usually argue he exaggerated the greenhouse problem in
his environmental activist film and book An Inconvenient Truth. But
he hardly referred to IPCC data in his documentary. Instead he used
information from scientists he himself had met at several American
universities.
There are three working groups in the IPCC that all have distinct tasks, their own authors and work practically independent of each other.
Working group I, consisting of scientists who study the nuts and bolts of global warming, looks into why this happens and how it will continue. It only evaluates research that has been published in authoritative, peer reviewed, magazines.
Working group II has a less specific assignment. It looks into the consequences of climate changes and is made up of biologists, ecologists, hydraulic engineers, agricultural experts and such. Is has to make statements about specific effects of climate change in different parts of the world, some of which have barely been studied. Therefore, the group uses so-called 'gray literature': studies that have not yet been reviewed and reports by organisations like Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature. But also documentation from insurance companies, tourist organisations, the World Bank and theOECD and, yes, a student's thesis and an article from a mountaineering magazine. The faults that were recently discovered were printed in the section of this working group.
Working group III, which assesses options for limiting greenhouse gas emissions and otherwise mitigating climate change, has not been so controversial, but is plays an important role in formulating governments’ environmental policies.
The working groups
Seemingly overnight, the IPCC is losing authority because erroneous excerpts have been found in the 980 pages of one of its three working group reports. Journalists in England and the Netherlands disclosed last week that the working group II report wrongly states the glaciers in the Himalayas will disappear by 2035 instead of 2350, and that the Netherlands is 55 percent below sea level instead of 26 percent. To the great bewilderment of scientists, Dutch environment minister Jacqueline Cramer, previously a scientist and environmental activist, has demanded an investigation into the errors.
No proof of malice or gross negligence on the part of the IPCC has been found. The inaccurate statement concerning the Netherlands’ altitude was based on data provided by a Dutch government agency and therefore not easily refuted by others. Moreover the statement was only used to illustrate the possible consequences of climate change, not to prove it - it was harmless.
A bigger fish for climate sceptics
The inaccurate figure predicting the melting of Himalayan glaciers came from a report by the World Wide Fund for Nature, a source of other claims in the working group II report. The IPCC's well-documented process reveals the mistake was more or less discovered, but a definitive correction remained forthcoming. Very unfortunate, but is it a disaster? It is hard to find Dutch newspaper articles that reported the eminent demise of the glaciers when the report came out.
The scandal of the hacked or leaked email correspondence about temperature reconstructions between climate researchers Phil Jones, Michael Mann, Kevin Trenberth and others looked like a bigger fish for climate sceptics. The 1,000 emails taken from the servers of the University of East Anglia in England show how far the hatred and distrust between climate scientists and climate sceptics has escalated. The messages prove the climate researchers are not innocent in this mudslinging battle. They stalled the release of their data and tried to prevent opponents from publishing articles.
The most damaging detail was that Jones and Mann talked about "a trick" to adjust long term temperature data to arrive at the desired outcome. The deliberate manipulation was thought to be an attempt to save the so-called hockey-stick graph, a reconstruction of global temperatures since the Middle Ages that shows the average temperature has spiked in the 20th century. Last Wednesday Pennsylvania State University, where Mann is a professor, cleared him of scientific misconduct. The trick was a legitimate statistical tool, according to a university panel that looked into the matter.
But, at the same time, further scrutiny of the emails seemed to reveal that Jones used unreliable Chinese statistics for an article he published in the journal, Nature, in 1990 about the impact of urbanisation on the quality of temperature measurements. He learnt about flaws in the data, but never considered putting them into perspective or correcting them. The latest IPCC report from working group I still refers to his research, but also to a series of more recent articles by other authors that support Jones' conclusions. His negligence - if there was any - has not had any consequences. But it may prove a hazardous attitude for someone who was a coordinating lead author of the IPCC chapter on temperature measurements.
The most important conclusion remains that nothing, absolutely nothing, has been adduced that challenges the conclusions of working group I about the greenhouse effect and climate change.