Word: ipcc
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...that was 2007. Over the past week or two, the IPCC has seen its reputation for impartiality and accuracy take serious hits. First the global body admitted to an embarrassing factual mistake: the claim in the 2007 report that the glaciers of the Himalayas could disappear by 2035 if the world continued warming at its current rate. That finding was revealed to be false, and worse, it was discovered to be based not on any peer-reviewed science but on a speculative comment made to a New Scientist reporter by one researcher...
Even as Glaciergate - yes, that's what they're calling it - unfolded, there were new claims that the IPCC had essentially trumped up the link between climate change and the rising toll from natural disasters. IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the group's Nobel in 2007, had to dodge calls for his resignation amid charges that he was benefiting financially from global-warming research. Very suddenly the global body that had seemingly closed the case on climate change was springing more leaks than, well, a melting glacier. (See pictures of this fragile earth...
What's wrong with the IPCC? To some degree, it's a victim of its own size. In a group as large as the IPCC, producing climate-assessment reports in excess of 1,000 pages - exclusively with voluntary labor - errors are going to be inevitable. Humans make mistakes and the IPCC has owned up to its error, says Richard Somerville, an atmospheric scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a lead author on the 2007 IPCC report...
...IPCC could be better, but we need to keep its missteps in perspective, Somerville says. A bank can make mistakes too, but that doesn't mean you tear down the bank. And for all the attention paid to the IPCC's mistakes, the panel's overall conclusion that global temperatures are rising and that man-made greenhouse-gas emissions are the key cause remains as solid as science can be. There is no debate about the core urgency, says Peter Frumhoff, director of science and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists...
Still, there's always the risk of groupthink, of the marginalization of dissenting views, in a body as big as the IPCC - something critics of the group have complained about for some time. At a meeting of major developing nations in New Delhi earlier this week, Xie Zhenhua, vice chairman of China's National Development and Reform Commission, called for the IPCC's next major assessment, due in 2014, to include a broader set of scientific viewpoints. "We need to adopt an open attitude to scientific research and incorporate all views," Xie told reporters. "Scientists are waiting for the fifth...