Having collectively bagged a Nobel peace prize, the only path for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was down. And the forceful analysis of the panel’s failings just published by the InterAcademy Council is a strong dose of realism about the organisation’s failings – and about our own inflated expectations about what it can achieve. Change must come if the panel is to have a useful future.

The IPCC has tried hard to preserve the normal rules of scientific discourse and to explain continuing uncertainty, but it has been pushed towards simple sound-bite conclusions. Some of this pressure has come from the desire of many scientists to underline their concerns about the dangers the world faces. Sometimes, in the process, “could happen” has become “will happen”, and analysis has veered close to advocacy. Journalists have been willing colluders.

On occasions, this has led to exaggerated claims and a reluctance to subject eye-catching research findings to proper scrutiny. Most notoriously, the most recent IPCC report, published in 2007, included a claim that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. This turned out to be an old and unassessed argument cut and pasted from magazine articles, including one in New Scientist in 1999.

This error, swiftly dubbed “glaciergate” after it was exposed in New Scientist, became damaging primarily because IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri defended it for several weeks rather than swiftly admitting the mistake. (The year 2350 is a more likely date for an ice-free Himalayas).


But the last IPCC report contained other apparently unassessed claims from literature that is opaque and often not peer-reviewed. They included a claim that agricultural yields in some African countries could fall by 50 per cent by 2020 – a figure that turned out to reflect little more than existing differences between wet and dry years.

Sclerosis or scaremongering?

It would be unfair to suggest that the IPCC has always erred on the side of exaggeration, however. Far from it. Its 2007 assessment in particular played down growing scientific concern about the potential runaway effects of climate change – tipping points and positive feedbacks that could make change faster and more violent and projected in most climate models.

If the IPCC has developed a bias, it has been towards suggesting that scientists know more than they really do about how climate change will play out. It could be as guilty of underplaying risks as of over-egging them. Institutional sclerosis rather than scaremongering is the real charge.

In addressing that problem, the changes proposed by the InterAgency Council make sense. In particular, a faster turnover of senior figures on the panel will reduce the dangers of institutional inertia. It will ensure that new thinking gets more of a say and errors can be more swiftly corrected.

The strictures on more transparency may also help prevent the problems in report-drafting revealed in the parallel “climategate” scandal about the emails stolen from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, some of which concerned the IPCC.

The reforms will probably be pushed through at the panel’s next plenary in South Korea in October, and they will most likely include replacing its current chairman Pachauri, who has too often been found defending the indefensible. We must hope so. The IPCC needs and deserves an overhaul.