"Eric Gisin" wrote in message
...
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.


[rest at URL]


At the end of the day, or rather the article, it says..

Quote

The PBL report does not prove or indeed suggest systematic bias, and it
stresses that it has found nothing that should lead the parliament of the
Netherlands, or anyone else, to reject the IPCC's findings. But the panel
set up to look at the IPCC's workings by Dr Pachauri and Mr Ban should ask
some hard questions about systematic tendencies to accentuate the negative.