Rajendra Pachauri, who has faced criticism as chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) following allegations of inaccurate statements in panel reports, suffered a fresh blow on Sunday night when he failed to get the backing of the British government.
A senior British government official reiterated Pachauri’s position but stopped short of expressing confidence in him.
“The position is that he is the chair and he has indicated that mistakes were made,” the climate change official said. “There is no vacancy at this stage, so there is no issue at this stage.”
The IPCC is required by governments to assess the science and impact of climate change and its thousands of scientists produce major reports and summaries for policymakers.
Its last report in 2007 concluded that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities were 90 percent certain to be causing observed global warming and was accepted by all governments.
“It is clearly unfortunate that individual problems with individual papers have been found,” the official said.
“But the scientific basis for climate change does not rest on a very small number of papers in which the [IPCC] review process has not been rigorous enough. It relies on thousands and thousands of papers that have been peer reviewed through scientific journals,” the official said.
The British government has told the IPCC through official channels that it must ensure review standards are robust and its communication effective.
“They need to communicate that 99 percent of the science on which they base [their work] is peer reviewed,” the official said.
The incident most damaging to the IPCC was the inclusion in the 2007 report of a claim that all Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035. The IPCC admitted last month that the claim was supported only by a quote given to journalists, blaming a failure to adhere to its own review procedures.
It was also alleged that the panel was told of the error as early as 2006. In November, Pachauri dismissed a report stating the 2035 claim was wrong as “voodoo science.”
A claim made by the IPCC that climate change was melting glaciers in the European Alps, the Andes and Africa was reported by the Sunday Telegraph on Sunday to be based on a student dissertation and a climbing magazine article, not scientific journal papers.
Scientists remain convinced, however, that glaciers are melting rapidly.
Last week, the World Glacier Monitoring Service’s annual report indicated most glaciers were continuing to melt at historically high rates.
Other individual claims allegedly not supported by peer-reviewed scientific papers are that climate change has increased the severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes — an allegation denied by the IPCC — and that 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest “could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation” caused by global warming.
All the disputed claims appear in the second volume of the 2007 IPCC report, which deals with the impact of rising temperatures. Scientists acknowledge there are much greater uncertainties in this area than in the volume, which sets out how much the planet is warming and why.
On Sunday, British Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband declared a “battle” against the “siren voices” who denied global warming was real or caused by humans, or that there was a need to cut carbon emissions to tackle it.
“It’s right that there’s rigor applied to all the reports about climate change, but I think it would be wrong that when a mistake is made it’s somehow used to undermine the overwhelming picture that’s there,” Milliband said.
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