New errors in IPCC climate change
report
By Richard Gray and Ben Leach
Published: 9:00PM GMT 06 Feb 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7177230/New-errors-in-IPCC-climate-change-report.html
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report is
supposed to be the world’s most authoritative scientific account of
the scale of global warming.
But this paper has discovered a series of new flaws in it
including:
The publication of inaccurate data on the potential of wave power
to produce electricity around the world, which was wrongly
attributed to the website of a commercial wave-energy
company.
Claims based on information in press releases and
newsletters.
New examples of statements based on student dissertations, two of
which were unpublished.
More claims which were based on reports produced by environmental
pressure groups.
They are the latest in a series of damaging revelations about the
IPCC’s most recent report, published in 2007.
Last month, the panel was forced to issue a humiliating retraction
after it emerged statements about the melting of Himalayan glaciers
were inaccurate.
Last weekend, this paper revealed that the panel had based claims
about disappearing mountain ice on anecdotal evidence in a
student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering
magazine.
And on Friday, it emerged that the IPCC’s panel had wrongly
reported that more than half of the Netherlands was below sea level
because it had failed to check information supplied by a Dutch
government agency.
Researchers insist the errors are minor and do not impact on the
overall conclusions about climate change.
However, senior scientists are now expressing concern at the way
the IPCC compiles its reports and have hit out at the panel’s use
of so-called “grey literature” — evidence from sources that have
not been subjected to scientific *scrutiny.
A new poll has revealed that public belief in climate change is
weakening.The panel’s controversial chair, Rajendra Pachauri,
pictured right, is facing pressure to resign over the affair.
The IPCC attempted to counter growing criticism by releasing a
statement insisting that authors who contribute to its 3,000-page
report are required to “critically assess and review the quality
and validity of each source” when they use material from
unpublished or non-peer-reviewed sources. Drafts of the reports are
checked by scientific reviewers before they are subjected to
line-by-line approval by the 130 member countries of the
IPCC.
Despite these checks, a diagram used to demonstrate the potential
for generating electricity from wave power has been found to
contain numerous errors.
The source of information for the diagram was cited as the website
of UK-based wave-energy company Wavegen. Yet the diagram on
Wavegen’s website contains dramatically different figures for
energy potential off Britain and Alaska and in the Bering
Sea.
When contacted by The Sunday Telegraph, Wavegen insisted that the
diagram on its website had not been changed. It added that it was
not the original source of the data and had simply reproduced it on
its website.
The diagram is widely cited in other literature as having come from
a paper on wave energy produced by the Institute of Mechanical
Engineering in 1991 along with data from the European Directory of
Renewable Energy.
Experts claim that, had the IPCC checked the citation properly, it
would have spotted the discrepancies.
It can also be revealed that claims made by the IPCC about the
effects of global warming, and suggestions about ways it could be
avoided, were partly based on information from ten dissertations by
Masters students.
One unpublished dissertation was used to support the claim that
sea-level rise could impact on people living in the Nile delta and
other African coastal areas, although the main focus of the thesis,
by a student at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, appears to have
been the impact of computer software on environmental
development.
The IPCC also made use of a report by US conservation group
Defenders of Wildlife to state that salmon in US streams have been
affected by rising temperatures. The panel has already come under
fire for using information in reports by conservation charity the
WWF.
Estimates of carbon-dioxide emissions from nuclear power stations
and claims that suggested they were cheaper than coal or gas power
stations were also taken from the website of the World Nuclear
Association, rather than using independent scientific
calculations.
Such revelations are creating growing public confusion over climate
change. A poll by Ipsos on behalf of environmental consultancy firm
Euro RSCG revealed that the proportion of the public who believe in
the reality of climate change has dropped from 44 per cent to 31per
cent in the past year.
The proportion of people who believe that climate change is a bit
over-exaggerated rose from 22 per cent to 31per cent.
Climate scientists have expressed frustration with the IPCC’s use
of unreliable evidence.
Alan Thorpe, chief executive of the Natural Environment Research
Council, the biggest funder of climate science in the UK, said: “We
should only be dealing with peer-reviewed literature. We open
ourselves up to trouble if we start getting into hearsay and grey
literature. We have enough research that has been peer-reviewed to
provide evidence for climate change, so it is concerning that the
IPCC has strayed from that.”
Professor Bob Watson, who chaired the IPCC before Dr Pachauri and
is now chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and
Rural Affairs, insisted that despite the errors there was little
doubt that human-induced climate change was a reality.
But he called for changes in the way the IPCC compiles future
reports.
“It is concerning that these mistakes have appeared in the IPCC
report, but there is no doubt the earth’s climate is changing and
the only way we can explain those changes is primarily human
activity,” he said.
Mr Watson said that Dr Pachauri “cannot be personally blamed for
one or two incorrect sentences in the IPCC report”, but stressed
that the chairman must take responsibility for correcting
errors.
Another row over the IPCC report emerged last night after Professor
Roger Pielke Jnr, from Colorado University’s Centre for Science and
Technology Policy Research, claimed its authors deliberately
ignored a paper he wrote that contradicted the panel’s claims about
the cost of climate-related natural disasters.
A document included a statement from an anonymous IPCC author
saying that they believed Dr Pielke had changed his mind on the
matter, when he had not.