The head of the UN’s climate science panel said yesterday that a doomsday prediction about the fate of Himalayan glaciers was “a regrettable error.”
Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in an e-mailed statement to media outlets that the mistake arose out of “established procedures not being diligently followed.”
Pachauri was referring to a forecast that featured in a benchmark report on global warming that the probability of glaciers in the Himalayas “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high.”
The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report was a 938-page opus released in 2007 that warned climate change was on the march that spurred politicians around the world to vow action.
Earlier in week, the panel apologized for “the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures.”
In the latest statement on what the media have dubbed “Climategate,” Pachauri said that the possibility of further errors in the report was “minimal, if not non-existent.”
Pachauri added that the report’s general conclusions, which said that Himalayan glaciers were retreating because of global warming, were “robust, appropriate, and entirely consistent with the underlying science.”
He said the forecast that the glaciers could disappear by 2035 may have “genuinely alarmed” some people. But he said there had been a benefit in that it created a “heightened awareness about the real threat to Himalayan glaciers.”
The IPCC co-won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for bringing climate change to the world’s attention.
The glacier error came to light after four prominent glaciologists and hydrologists wrote a letter to the US journal Science. They said the paragraph’s mistakes stemmed from a report by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
The WWF had picked up a news report based on an unpublished study, compounded by the accidental inversion of a date — 2035 instead of 2350 — in a Russian paper that had been published in 1996.
The IPCC came under ferocious attack from climate skeptics ahead of the UN conference in Copenhagen last month.
But Pachauri has defended the panel’s overall work, a position shared by other scientists, who say the core conclusions about climate change are incontrovertible.
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