Environment

UN to Probe Climate Change Panel Re Accusations of Erroneous Data

by Barry ORegan | February 27, 2010 at 10:17 am

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The United Nations is taking action on environmental falsehoods that came to light with respect to its cited data on climate change.

Wayward emails by environmental groups and scientists spelling their erroneous theories in advance of the Copenhagen Accord never seemed to make the light of day, until resourceful hackers brought everything into the open.

In a step back from what it once presented as "settled science," the United Nations announced yesterday it would launch a review of its embattled climate change panel, whose credibility has been tarnished by global warming reporting errors.

The planned overhaul of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change comes just weeks after Britain's University of East Anglia launched its own quality control inquiry into the content of hacked e-mails that appear to show scientists seeking to silence dissenting climate change opinion.

Climate change skeptics say that, taken together, the two reviews amount to an admission on the part of those raising the global warming alarm that they have been relying on shaky data.

But the UN and climate change advocates say the errors exposed do not undermine the central conclusions of the IPCC's watershed 2007 "assessment" report -- that climate change is a fact, and that the prevailing view among leading scientists is that industrial activity has significantly aggravated its intensity.

The report shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, and has driven political momentum to agree a new, more ambitious climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol.