Two important articles from the UK today, this long one from the centre-left Economist.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsb...nd_ipcc_report

Accentuate the negative

Jul 5th 2010, 10:11 by The Economist online

FOR everyone else it was the glaciers: for the Dutch it was the flooding. Last January errors in
the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) hit the headlines. The chapter on
Asia in the report by the IPCC's second working group, charged with looking at the impact of
climatye change and adapting to it, mistakenly claimed that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by
2035. This contradicted some reasonably basic physics, had not been predicted by the glacier
specialists in the first working group (which deals with the natural science of past and future
climate change) and was unsupported by any evidence. There was a report from the 1990s which said
something similar about all the world's non-polar glaciers, but it gave the date as 2350. Then
there was a crucial typo and some shoddy referencing. Nevertheless the IPCC's chair, Rajendra
Pachauri, had lashed out at people bringing the criticism up, accusing them of "voodoo science". He
then had to eat his words, and set up, with Ban Ki-moon, a panel to look into ways the IPCC might
be improved.


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