IPCC in a spin over "poor" appliance of climate science

Geneva, Switzerland – The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a statement in response to continuing questions over the accuracy and robustness of the science behinds its claims about the impact of climate change on glaciers in the Himalayas.

In a concluding document of its Fourth Assessment Report, the IPCC had stated: “Widespread mass losses from glaciers and reductions in snow cover over recent decades are projected to accelerate throughout the 21st century, reducing water availability, hydropower potential, and changing seasonality of flows in regions supplied by meltwater from major mountain ranges (e.g. Hindu-Kush, Himalaya, Andes), where more than one-sixth of the world population currently lives.”

While insisting that this conclusion remained robust, IPCC admitted that it had “recently come to our attention that a paragraph in the [report] refers to poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly.”

The chair, vice-chairs, and co-chairs of the IPCC went on to express regret at the “poor application” of IPCC procedures in this case. They added that the episode Showed how quality of the assessment depended on strict adherence to the IPCC standards, including thorough review of “the quality and validity of each source before incorporating results from the source into an IPCC Report.”

Meanwhile, The Sunday Times claims to have uncovered another serious blunder by the IPCC, which it claims wrongly linked hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters to climate change. According to the newspaper’s report, the UN climate science panel had based its claims on an unvetted 2006 study by London-based Risk Management Solutions (RMS).

The IPCC had continued to use evidence from the report up to and during the recent Copenhagen Summit, even though the RMS authors had withdrawn the conclusions of the report as insufficiently verfiied, the Sunday Times alleged.

In response, the IPCC issued a statement, whivh described the Sunday Times report as “misleading and baseless”, arguing that a brief section on trends in economic losses from climate-related disasters was unrepresentative of the bulk of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report and insisting that the report offered a “balanced treatment of a complicated and important issue.”