Climate Review

The U.N. will establish a panel of scientists to review its own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change amidst growing public scrutiny of the body since releasing an inaccurate report on glacial melting. “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been under fire after it was revealed one of its 2007 reports wrongly included a prediction that Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035. The figure should have been 2350. That mistake and others have fueled a resurgence of climate skepticism in some quarters but the U.N. says the fundamental claims of the IPCC — that dangerous climate change is caused by mankind — remains unshaken. The panel will be part of a broader review of the IPCC to be announced next week, said Nick Nuttall, spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). ‘It will be senior scientific figures. I can’tname who they are right now. It should do a review of the IPCC, produce a report by, say, August and there is a plenary of the IPCC in South Korea in October. The report will go there for adoption,” he told reporters on the sidelines of a UNEP conference in Nusa Dua, on the Indonesian island of Bali, where environment ministers have been meeting this week.

‘There’s no review panel at the moment. Yesterday, it was clear from the member states roughly how they would like this panel to be, i.e. fully independent and not appointed by the IPCC but appointed by an independent group of scientists themselves,’ he said.”