NEW DELHI: The head of a panel of United Nations climate scientists said Saturday he would not resign despite a recent admission that a panel report warning Himalayan glaciers could be gone by 2035 was hundreds of years off.
The claim, made in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s voluminous, Nobel-winning report, came in a paragraph with several errors. Data indicates the ice could melt by 2350. The assertion went virtually unnoticed until The Sunday Times said the projection seemed to be based on a news report. The scientists are investigating how the forecast got into the report and apologized Thursday for the mistakes, adding that they were not intentional. But the errors have opened the door for attacks from climate change skeptics.
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 prestigious US journal Science. They said the paragraph’s mistakes stemmed from a report by the conservation group WWF. It had picked up a news report based on an unpublished study, compounded by the accidental inversion of a date — 2035 instead of 2350 — in a Russian paper published in 1996.
“These errors could have been avoided had the norms of scientific publication, including peer review and concentration upon peer-reviewed work, been respected,” according to the letter to Science.
But Rajendra Pachauri, who heads the panel, said no action would be taken against the authors of the report and he would not resign. “I have no intention of resigning from my position,” Pachauri said on Saturday, adding the errors were unintentional and not significant in comparison to the entire report.
The mistakes also do not negate the fact that worldwide, glaciers are melting faster than ever, he said. He added that such mistakes must be avoided because effective climate change policy depends on good, credible science. He said he is now working on the fifth IPCC assessment report dealing with sea level rise and ice sheets, oceans, clouds and carbon accounting. The report is expected by 2014.
