UN panel defends climate change evidence
By AFP Staff
GENEVA — The UN climate panel has rejected as “baseless and misleading” a newspaper report that raised doubts about the evidence behind a claim that global warming is linked to worsening natural disasters.
This weekend, the Sunday Times of London reported that a passage in one of the panel’s reports, which suggested natural disasters including hurricanes and floods had increased in number and intensity, had been challenged.
The IPCC insisted in a statement released late on Monday that the targeted study was quoted alongside others in balanced manner exposing the range of evidence. It said the panel had weighed its conclusions.
“This section of the IPCC report is a balanced treatment of a complicated and important issue.”
“It clearly makes the point that one study detected an increase in economic losses, corrected for values at risk, but that other studies have not detected such a trend,” the statement added.
“The tone is balanced, and the section contains many important qualifiers.”
The panel also underlined that it came to several conclusions about the role of climate change in extreme weather events and disasters in different sections of its reports, based on a “careful” assessment of past changes and projections of future trends.
The panel concluded that the newspaper “ran a misleading and baseless story attacking the way the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC handled an important question concerning recent trends in economic losses from climate-related disasters.”
The Sunday Times had reported that the IPCC included the reference to the then unpublished study despite doubts raised by at least two scientific reviewers at the time.
Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a climatologist at the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium and the vice-chairman of the IPCC, was quoted by the newspaper as saying that the panel was reassessing the evidence.
It was the second time in recent weeks that doubt was cast on the scientific validity some of the evidence used in the UN panel’s reports.
The IPCC last week admitted errors in a forecast about melting Himalayan glaciers that was included in a landmark 2007 report.
The ongoing series of reports compiled since 1999 are meant to reflect a global scientific consensus to guide official action against climate change.
