World’s top scientists to review climate panel

March 11, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

UNITED NATIONS

At a tumultuous time in U.N.-led climate negotiations, one of the world’s most credible scientific groups agreed Wednesday to plug the recent cracks in the authoritative reports of the United Nations’ Nobel Prize-winning global warming panel.

“We enter this process with no preconceived conclusions,” said Robbert Dijkgraaf, a Dutch mathematical physicist who co-chairs the group, the Inter- Academy Council of 15 nations’ national academies of science.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon asserted “there were a very small number of errors” in the 3,000 pages of the beleaguered U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s last major synthesis of climate data in 2007.

But those errors, which include projections of retreats in Himalayan glaciers, have put public confidence in the panel’s work at risk and have been seized on by climate skeptics opposed to the U.N.-led efforts to conclude a legal international agreement on global warming this year.

The nonbinding Copenhagen accord brokered by President Barack Obama in the final hours of the December climate-change summit in the Danish capital has the support of major polluters and economies such as the U.S., China and India. But it fell well short of its original ambition of a legally binding treaty controlling the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming.