Earth Equity News

IPCC Deals with Mistakes in 2007 Report. By Seth Borenstein, AP, February 8, 2010. "The flaws -- and the erosion they've caused in public confidence -- have some scientists calling for drastic changes in how future United Nations climate reports are done. A push for reform being published in Thursday's issue of a prestigious scientific journal comes on top of a growing clamor for the resignation of the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The work of the climate change panel, or IPCC, is often portrayed as one massive tome. But it really is four separate reports on different aspects of global warming, written months apart by distinct groups of scientists. No errors have surfaced in the first and most well-known of the reports, which said the physics of a warming atmosphere and rising seas is man-made and incontrovertible. So far, four mistakes have been discovered in the second report, which attempts to translate what global warming might mean to daily lives around the world. 'A lot of stuff in there was just not very good.' said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a lead author of the first report. 'A chronic problem is that on the whole area of impacts, getting into the realm of social science, it is a softer science. The facts are not as good.'

"The second report includes chapters on each region, which governments want to be mostly written by local experts, some of whom may not have the science credentials of other report authors... Many IPCC scientists say it's impressive that so far only four errors have been found in 986 pages of the second report, with the overwhelming majority of the findings correct and well-supported. However, former IPCC Chairman Bob Watson said, 'We cannot take that attitude. Any mistakes do allow skeptics to have a field day and to use it to undermine public confidence, private sector confidence, government confidence in the IPCC.'"