IPCC announces "independent" review

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.

click for IPCC web 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 Procedures

New 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

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103 Comments
Manfred
March 12, 2010 3:42 pm

milanovic (03:55:02) :
your consiracy attribut is misleading.
there is no proven global conspiracy.
however, there is proof of conspiracy on local and chapter scale. the cru emails made this obvious to anyone.
the schneider group obviously intends to use the NAS as their tool to propagate their own agenda.
WWF acivists have produced dozens of misleading “scientific reports”, to influence governments, the public and the IPCC and they now occupy leading positions in politics and sicence, particularly in the UK.
the philantropist billionaire branch finances his own global network.
so there are quite obviously strings and networks of likeminded people whose intention is not to work openly and to follow scientific ethics codes.
though there is no proven global conspiracy (with another line of puppetmasters in he background), I think conspiracy laws are sill applicable to these perhaps independant groups.

Anu
March 12, 2010 11:16 pm

geo (10:36:34) :
Anu (17:38:15) :
Nice try. The total UN yearly budget is on the order of $40B/year. If we take $69M (your number for WMO and UNEP), and assume 25% of that is for IPCC (which is probably still high) then that is .04% of the UN budget. .04% of $1.6B is $640K.

—–
In 2007, the UN Regular Budget was $2.054 billion.
The budget for UN Specialized agencies was $2.198 billion.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/un-finance/tables-and-charts-on-un-finance/un-system-budget/27505.html
If your total budget for an organization was $4.252 million, and one of your accounts receivable owed you $1.6 million for years (37.6% budget shortfall), exactly where would you cut expenses ? Any one item might seem negligible, but you must make up for a huge shortfall. Quality would suffer.
Yes, I think it is clear that voluntary “in kind” contributions of scientist time paid for directly or indirectly out of the US budget is well north of that.
I heard Al Gore makes about $500 billion a year, so if he donates 3 hours of his time to the IPCC, that’s worth about $300 million off of the US debt (he works 100 hour weeks).

milanovic
March 14, 2010 11:48 pm

@Manfred
For the record: I was being sarcastic, but anyway thinking in terms of conspiracies is not very productive in the discussion I think. The same goes the other way round: there are also ample conspiracies of oil companies paying the denialist movement, it can be just as well argued that they do not work openly or follow scientific ethics code. But both arguments are not productive.
If I see the comments here, it appears that the majority is believing in conspiracies of “global warming alarmists” and that is very difficult to take seriously.

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