New errors in IPCC climate change report
By Richard Gray and Ben Leach
Published: 9:00PM GMT 06 Feb 2010
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New examples of statements based on student dissertations, two of which were unpublished.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validity of each source” when they use material from unpublished or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.