Opinion: Reorganize the IPCC?

On Wednesday last week, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, apologized for including, in the organization’s fourth assessment report of 2007, the claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. In fact, it will take at least 300 years for global warming to take its toll.Given that the IPCC’s 2007 report had won the panel a Nobel peace prize that year (shared with Al Gore), the error looks egregious, particularly to those who reject the idea that the billions of tonnes of carbon we pump into the atmosphere could possibly have an impact on our climate. Now, every word and line of IPCC’s work is being scrutinized by these skeptics in their search for further climate calumnies. If they are lucky, they may even stumble on one or two.The prospect, not surprisingly, causes many climate change scientists to squirm. Indeed, such is their discomfort that many now argue it is time for a total reorganization of the IPCC, an organization that is now more than two decades old and whose operations are beginning to creak suspiciously.

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