The IPCC's "warming bias"

Robert Watson

It’s curious, isn’t it, that all of the errors that have been picked up in IPCC AR4 over the past few weeks have been in the warming direction? They all exaggerate the effects of climate change to some extent. If there were random errors, then one would assume that there would be a roughly equal amount indicating less warming as more warming. But no, they all indicate more warming.  To my mind this can only indicate one thing: there is a pre-conceived agenda that global warming is real and dangerous, and the IPCC is desperately looking for evidence to back that up. What it should be doing is looking impartially at the evidence and evaluating it free from such preconceptions. But when your organisation’s very existence depends on one particular outcome, it isn’t surprising that that is precisely what you find…

The UN body that advises world leaders on climate change must investigate an apparent bias in its report that resulted in several exaggerations of the impact of global warming, according to its former chairman.

In an interview with The Times Robert Watson said that all the errors exposed so far in the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) resulted in overstatements of the severity of the problem.

Professor Watson, currently chief scientific adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said that if the errors had just been innocent mistakes, as has been claimed by the current chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, some would probably have understated the impact of climate change.

The errors have emerged in the past month after simple checking of the sources cited by the 2,500 scientists who produced the report.

The report falsely claimed that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 when evidence suggests that they will survive for another 300 years. It also claimed that global warming could cut rain-fed North African crop production by up to 50 per cent by 2020. A senior IPCC contributor has since admitted that there is no evidence to support this claim.

The Dutch Government has asked the IPCC to correct its claim that more than half the Netherlands is below sea level. The environment ministry said that only 26 per cent of the country was below sea level.

Professor Watson, who served as chairman of the IPCC from 1997-2002, said: “The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying. The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened.”

I think we know the reason.

Read it here.