A formal announcement was made in a press conference made at 12:30PM EST by the IPCC, which is getting press, for example here. But at the time of this writing, there’s no mention of it whatsoever on the main IPCC web page here:
UPDATE: They’ve finally added a mention of the press release, click link to see the updated main page.
From the The Times by Ben Webster
The United Nations is to announce an independent review of errors made by its climate change advisory body in an attempt to restore its credibility.
A team of the world’s leading scientists will investigate the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and ask why its supposedly rigorous procedures failed to detect at least three serious overstatements of the risk from global warming.
The review will be overseen by the InterAcademy Council, whose members are drawn from the world’s leading national science academies, including Britain’s Royal Society, the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The review will be led by Robbert Dijkgraaf, co-chairman of the Interacademy Council and president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
…
More at the Times
However having a look at the IPCC web page and lack of any mention of it on the main page that I can find, it would seem the announcement is more about PR than procedure. It doesn’t share the side bar or center stage with the upcoming AR5 or any of the other blurbs they’ve released in their defense in the last couple of months. [Note as mentioned above, they’ve added a link on the main page now. ]
To find it, you have to visit the Press Information page where they write:
====================================================
 |
 |
Launch of Independent Review of IPCC Processes and ProceduresNew York, UN Headquaters, 10 March 2010 |
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and IPCC Chair Dr. Rajendra Pachauri launched an Independent Review of the IPCC Processes and Procedures at a Press event held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York at 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday 10 March 2010. This was followed by a Press conference, where Robbert Dijkgraaf, Co-Chair of the InterAcademy Council (IAC), spoke to correspondents and answered questions.
The entire event was available live to journalists via the UN webcast at:: http://www.un.org/webcast/
The IPCC alerted media correspondents before it took place.
Accompanying documents are:
PRESS RELEASE – “Scientific Academy to Conduct Independent Review of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s
Processes and Procedures at Request of United Nations and IPCC”
Terms of Reference for the Independent Review by the IAC
Letters by the Chair of the IPCC and the UN Secretary General to the Co-Chairs of the InterAcademy Council (IAC)
(to be made available as soon as possible)
===================================================
It would seem they don’t much care for putting an attempt to restore credibility on the main page. Makes you wonder.
It will be interesting to see how they explain away some of the more blatant issues, like this one: IPCC Ignored Wildfire Corrections — 3 times
Ack (12:01:53) :
Yes, Ack, it will depend on who the reviewers are.
Wanna bet those reviewers will be bought and paid for by those friendly to the IPCC objectives?
I’d love to be proved wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.
The ‘independent review’ is to be carried out by the IAC, which is an umbrella organisation for National Science Academies who, by and large, have already come out in favour of AGW and the IPCC!
How ‘independent’ is that?
I’m sure we can predict it’s findings to within the accuracy of one of their
thermometers. It’s bit like crime reporting: it’s all that ever gets reported. I’m sick of crime reporting. Don’t need to hear about another single crime. The IPCC is getting close to those same nerve endings!!
The IPCC needs to call in a hazmat team. That place is contaminated with bad papers and rotten findings.
Just so I understand the situation:
An unelected body of career government workers now implanted in a bureaucratic organization that answers to no one and has clear expansion-of-funding goals is going to find an independent review of it’s own policies and practices to determine the source of errors that went undiscovered for years until citizens of multiple countries posted about them on the internet.
*sigh*
“We’re super cereal this time.”
I am on pins and needles waiting to hear the conclusions of this
independent review. Oh dear, oh my…what’s it going to be?
Their webpage, with camels crossing a hot, dry, dusty desert, just screams bias. A hot steamy jungle would have conveyed too much life, and we know there won’t be any left.
Haha… that’ll be the day! They’ll probably get Jones, Hansen, Gore, Schmidt, and similar ilk to sit on that panel.
‘The review will be overseen by the InterAcademy Council, whose members are drawn from the world’s leading national science academies, including Britain’s Royal Society’
Was it the Royal Society who wrote to Exxon-Mobil castigating them for their ‘inaccurate and misleading view of the science of climate change’ (google ‘royal society letter to nick’).
That’ll be be fair then.
With the BBC desperately cutting services to save money, if I were Richard Black I’d be worrying just his ‘small’ those errors really are.
Doh ! His = how. iPhones and predictive text !
Keep an eye on what the Chinese do with this. They have already telegraphed that they want AR5 to say what they want it to say:
“Stressing the fact that more scientific and consistent views are required, Xie said: …we will enhance cooperation in the report to make it more comprehensive.”
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/basic-ministers-task-ipccneed-for-rigour-in-climate-reports/383602/
The IPCC should be defunded. It is just another UN corrupt organization with no check and balances.
Just wanted to make a point of thanking all the worldwide contributors here, especially from parts of the world that most Americans get very little news of, such as The Netherlands, UK, Australia, etc. You provide valuable context to the little news from overseas that we do receive.
Interviewed on BBC Radio 4 this morning The Royal Society’s President Lord Reece
Interviewer: Do you think the current leadership of the IPCC should step aside?
Reece: I think we need to have every confidence in whoever is going to do the 5th assessment report.
Interviewer: With respect what does that mean for the current leadership?
Reece: I wouldn’t want to comment on the current leadership – we want to look forward and this committee needs to ensure that whoever does the next report learns from the mistakes made in the last report.
So it looks like there is a bullet with Pachauri written on it.
Feb 26: Breaking News: IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri to face independent inquiry
Mar 10: Pachauri co-launches “Independent Review of the IPCC Processes and Procedures”
Seemingly likely future Pachauri statement: “I did nothing wrong! I followed all the rules! And it is the rules, as you can now see, that are a total mess!”
I have something I want the UN IPCC to answer: Please define “independent”.
I am sure the concensus will be that the investigation was very robust.
From BBC: “Robbert Dijkgraaf, the council’s co-chair, said the review panel will be chosen so that it includes both inside knowledge of the IPCC and outside perspectives. “The panel will look forward and will definitely not go over all the vast amount of data in climate science,” he said.”
So everything that is in AR4 from a scientific and factual basis will be explicitly excluded from the scope. Neither will it assess the methodologies in AR4, other than as something to improve upon. You can bet that they will try to spin this as validating and exonerating AR4, however: you see when they report in August, they won’t be making it clear that the facts, evidence and methods weren’t in their purview.
So they are just going through the motions so that they can keep the politicians off their back, without changing the message to the politicians in any way.
“Let me be clear – the threat posed by climate change is real,” said Mr Ban…”I have seen no credible evidence that challenges the main conclusions of [the IPCC’s 2007] report.”
It doesn’t matter how much evidence is produced that challenges the conclusions, the UN can always declare it “not credible”. That means one of two things: it’s “not credible” because it is not worthy of being believed; or it’s “not credible” because they choose not to believe it.
Andy Scrase (12:26:15) :
There is a “crowd-sourcing” project to audit the amount if peer-reviewed material in AR4:
(…)
Does it really matter how much peer-reviewed material was used, given how many of those “peers” live in the same small echo chamber, and the IPCC defenders say it doesn’t matter that they used “grey literature” anyway?
old construction worker (13:49:32) :
The IPCC should be defunded. It is just another UN corrupt organization with no check and balances.
Didn’t you hear? All 2500 to 4000 full-fledged scientists who worked on “the FAR” were all unpaid volunteers. Yup, absolutely, every last one of them. Even poor Pachauri only has his lowly TERI salary to get by on. Not a single person was paid to work on it. None at all. Nada, zip. So what will de-funding the IPCC accomplish?
BTW, future acronym: the Fourth Assessment Report-Certified Exonerated
(you can put it together yourself)
It will be with us! 🙂
Billy Liar (13:37:04) :
“Was it the Royal Society who wrote to Exxon-Mobil castigating them for their ‘inaccurate and misleading view of the science of climate change’ (google ‘royal society letter to nick’).”
Yes, the same Royal Society that tried to have Channel 4 (TV channel in UK) censured for showing the opinions of Christy, Singer, Lindzen, Reiter, Calder, Philip Stott and other prominent sceptics.
President of the Royal Society, Martin Rees, who destroyed the careers of scientists who have dared to try to publish material that exposed the fallacies in the work he did as an astronomer in the 1960s and 1970s, said that the Ofcom judgment was wrong that exonerated Channel 4, which ruled that they had a duty under the terms of their licence to show minority reports! Wrong on the basis that it was DANGEROUS to allow the public to hear the views of sceptics lest they be persuaded by them. Yes, this man is the head of the Royal Society.
James F. Evans (13:10:12) : “Wanna bet those reviewers will be bought and paid for by those friendly to the IPCC objectives? I’d love to be proved wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.”
Bribery is not a requirement. They need merely be offered a free tour of the UN building in Vienna:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1224377/British-nuclear-experts-17th-floor-UN-death-plunge-suicide.html
This whole thing reminds me of Sadam’s Oil For Food Program. That when horribly awry, so any guess about this going in the same direction?
Not a great confidence builder, is it? What a joke the UN is, at any and all levels and in all their endeavors.
If this bunch does an evasive, halfway job, like the Warren Commission, it’ll just make things worse for the UN by adding to the litany of mistakes and bad faith that can be heaped upon their side.
But they have no choice — how can they dig into matters like Dr. Lal’s claim of not receiving Georg Kaser’s letter, etc.? Any thorough rock-turning would be fatal.
If they were acting in good faith they would ask for a submission of questions to be investigated, and post them online, the way the UK’s Parliamentary Inquiry did earlier this year.
If they think they can restore credibility by getting a gang of institutions that have signed up to be “on message” to come up with a report that amounts to: “lots of silly mistakes, but the basic science is still sound” then they can sit on it and swivel! Despite all the scandal, they still are not even going to consider that there may be a problem with AGW!
This whole thing is a box-ticking exercise so that the western liberal oligarchy can proceed to strongarm in a UN-based carbon trading scheme.
“We’ve audited the IPCC and found overwhelming evidence that we are still in deadly danger” says Ed Millipede, staring wildly at the camera and foaming at the mouth…