IPCC should investigate 'warming bias' in its report, says former climate chief - India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

The former chief of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said that the climate body must investigate an apparent bias in its report that resulted in several exaggerations of the impact of global warming, including the fiasco on the estimated date for the melting of Himalayan glaciers. According to a report in The Times, Robert Watson said that all the errors exposed so far in the report by the IPCC resulted in overstatements of the severity of the problem. Professor Watson, currently chief scientific adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said that if the errors had just been innocent mistakes, as has been claimed by the current chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, some would probably have understated the impact of climate change. The errors have emerged in the past month after simple checking of the sources cited by the 2,500 scientists who produced the report. The report falsely claimed that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 when evidence suggests that they will survive for another 300 years. It also claimed that global warming could cut rain-fed North African crop production by up to 50 per cent by 2020. A senior IPCC contributor has since admitted that there is no evidence to support this claim. The Dutch Government has asked the IPCC to correct its claim that more than half the Netherlands is below sea level. The environment ministry said that only 26 per cent of the country was below sea level. According to Professor Watson, who served as chairman of the IPCC from 1997-2002, "The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying. The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened." He said that the IPCC should employ graduate science students to check the sources of each claim made in its next report, due in 2013. "Graduate students would love to be involved and they could really dig into the references and see if they really do support what is being said," he said. He said that the next report should acknowledge that some scientists believed the planet was warming at a much slower rate than has been claimed by the majority of scientists.