UNITED NATIONS (AP) – 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 ecomomies 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.
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Notes:
Since the UN also has a serious credibility problem I don’t see this going anywhere.
First of all….those weren’t “errors” in the reports. They were inserted deliberately to distort reality. Second, if this group doesn’t include a wide range of people NOT connected to the IPCC or the UN (or Mann,et al) in anyway, the effect would be similar to Ken Lay auditing Enron.