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UNITED NATIONS – At a tumultuous time in U.N.-led climate negotiations, one of the world's most credible scientific groups agreed Wednesday to plug the recent cracks in the authoritative reports of the United Nations' Nobel Prize-winning global warming panel.
"We enter this process with no preconceived conclusions," said Robbert Dijkgraaf, a Dutch mathematical physicist who co-chairs the group, the InterAcademy Council of 15 nations' national academies of science.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon asserted "there were a very small number of errors" in the 3,000 pages of the beleaguered U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's last major synthesis of climate data in 2007.
But those errors, which include projections of retreats in Himalayan glaciers, have put public confidence in the panel's work at risk, and have been seized on by climate skeptics opposed to the U.N.-led efforts to conclude a legal international agreement on global warming this year.
The nonbinding Copenhagen accord brokered by President Barack Obama in the final hours of the December climate change summit in the Danish capital has the support of major polluters and economies such as the U.S., China and India. But it fell well short of its original ambition of a legally binding treaty controlling the world's emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming.
Dijkgraaf said his Netherlands-based group, which agreed to the U.N.'s request to review the panel's work, "will definitely not go over all the data, the vast amount of data in climate science," but will instead focus on how the panel does its job, in light of the unsettling errors that have surfaced recently.
The review is being paid for by the United Nations, but Dijkgraaf said his group will operate completely independently. Its peer-reviewed final report, he said, is intended "to ensure the quality of IPCC reports in the future" including the U.N. panel's next scientific assessment report due in 2014.
The group will first pick a panel of outside experts and wrap up its independent review by the end of August, said Dijkgraaf, also president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Chris Field, a Stanford University professor who in 2008 took over as head of an IPCC group studying climate impacts, said the InterAcademy faces a challenge picking outside experts for the review since "almost anybody who has been involved in climate science has some connection with the IPCC."
Among the questions are: Whether the U.N. climate panel should consider non-peer reviewed literature? How governments review IPCC material? And even, how the IPCC communicates with the public?
No errors surfaced in the earlier and most well-known of the reports, which said the physics of a warming atmosphere and rising seas is man-made and incontrovertible.
But several mistakes have been discovered in the second of the four climate research reports produced in 2007, mainly owing to the use of reports by governments and advocacy groups instead of peer-reviewed research — resulting in fierce criticism of the U.N. panel's work.
For example, in the Asian chapter, five errors were spotted in a single entry saying Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 — hundreds of years earlier than other information suggests — with no research backing it up. The chapter on Europe states 55 percent of the Netherlands is below sea level, when it's really about half that amount.
And a section in the Africa chapter that talks about northern African agriculture says climate change and normal variability could reduce crop yields. But it gets oversimplified in later summaries so that lower projected crop yields are blamed solely on climate change.