Monbiot: “A scrupulously honest man has been much maligned”

CLIMATE PROGRESS, August 26, 2010

“No evidence was found that indicated personal fiduciary benefits accruing to Pachauri from his various advisory roles that would have led to a conflict of interest.”

That’s the finding of a detailed report by KPMG on the finances of Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

A great many U.S. reporters and bloggers owe an apology to Pachauri (see “N.Y. Times and Elisabeth Rosenthal Face Credibility Siege over Unbalanced Climate Coverage“).

Let’s see if they own up to it as the UK’s Telegraph finally did:

On 20 December 2009 we published an article about Dr Pachauri and his business interests. It was not intended to suggest that Dr Pachauri was corrupt or abusing his position as head of the IPCC and we accept KPMG found Dr Pachauri had not made “millions of dollars” in recent years. We apologise to Dr Pachauri for any embarrassment caused.

In fact, suggesting Pachauri was corrupt or abusing his position was the whole point of the story, which has been removed from their website but which you can easily find on right-wing websites by googling the title:  “Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri” by Christopher Booker and Richard North.

This whole smear against Pachauri was so outrageous, but so eagerly parroted by U.S. disinformers and so willingly lapped up by the U.S. media that I’m going to reprint below in its entirety, George Monbiot’s piece for the UK Guardian.  I hope others will echo this far and wide:

Has anyone been as badly maligned as Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)?

In December, the Sunday Telegraph carried a long and prominent feature written by Christopher Booker and Richard North, titled: Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri.

The subtitle alleged that Pachauri has been “making a fortune from his links with ‘carbon trading’ companies”. The article maintained that the money made by Pachauri while working for other organisations “must run into millions of dollars”.

It described his outside interests as “highly lucrative commercial jobs”. It proposed that these payments caused a “conflict of interest” with his IPCC role. It also complained that we don’t know “how much we all pay him” as chairman of the IPCC.

The story (which has subsequently been removed from the Sunday Telegraph’s website) immediately travelled around the world. It was reproduced on hundreds of blogs. The allegations it contained were widely aired in the media and generally believed. For a while, no discussion of climate change or the IPCC appeared complete without reference to Pachauri’s “dodgy” business dealings and alleged conflicts of interest.

There was just one problem: the story was untrue.

It’s not just that Pachauri hadn’t been profiting from the help he has given to charities, businesses and institutions, his accounts show that he is scrupulous to the point of self-denial. After the Sunday Telegraph published its story, the organisation for which Pachauri works – a charity called The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) – asked the auditors KPMG to review his financial relationships. Today, for the first time, the Guardian is publishing KPMG’s report.

KPMG studied all Pachauri’s financial records, accounts and tax returns, as well as TERI’s accounts, for the period 1 April 2008 – 31 December 2009. It found that any money paid as a result of the work that Pachauri had done for other organisations went not to him but to TERI. None of the money was paid back to him by TERI: he received only his annual salary, which is £45,000.

His total additional income over the 20 months reviewed by KPMG amounted to the following:

• A payment of 20,000 rupees (£278) from two national power commissions in India, on which he serves as director;

• 35,880 rupees (£498) for articles he has written and lectures he has given;

• A maximum of 100,000 rupees – or £1,389 – in the form of royalties from his books and awards.

In other words, he made £45,000 as his salary at TERI, and a maximum of £2,174 in outside earnings. So much for Pachauri’s “highly lucrative commercial jobs” amounting to “millions of dollars”.

Amazingly, the accounts also show that Pachauri transferred a lifetime achievement award he was given by the Environment Partnership Summit – 200,000 rupees – to TERI. In other words, he did not even keep money to which he was plainly entitled, let alone any money to which he was not.

As for “how much we all pay him” as chairman of the IPCC, here is the full sum:

£0.

It wouldn’t have been difficult for the Sunday Telegraph to have discovered this. It’s well known that the IPCC does not pay its chairmen. His job at TERI is not a “sideline”, as many of his opponents maintain. It is his livelihood.

This is a reflection of the lack of support given by governments to the IPCC. Its opponents like to create the impression that it’s an all-powerful body on the verge of creating a communist/fascist world government. In reality it’s a tiny, underfunded organisation which can’t even pay its own chairman.

Compare Pachauri’s total earnings to the kind of money made by the head of any of the UN agencies, or of the World Bank or the IMF, and you’ll see that he receives one-fifth or one-tenth of the cash raked in by his peers.

KPMG concluded:

No evidence was found that indicated personal fiduciary benefits accruing to Pachauri from his various advisory roles that would have led to a conflict of interest.

The Sunday Telegraph, in other words, maligned a scrupulously honest man.

How could the newspaper have got it so wrong? Was it because neither the journalists, nor anyone else at the paper, contacted Pachauri to check their claims?

When Pachauri approached the Sunday Telegraph, asking for a retraction, he was rebuffed. Far worse, the journalists pursued the attack in a series of further articles and blogposts. To me it looks as if Richard North was pursuing a vendetta against the IPCC chair. In a post in February, he wrote:

Pachauri is on the ropes but he ain’t down yet. The view is it will take one more ‘killer blow’ to fell him .. and it looks as if its been found! … R K Pachauri needs to be acquainted with the first rule of politics – DFWN … since it is a family blog, you’ll have to work it out for yourselves.

The abbreviation stands for “Don’t fuck with North”. In truth Pachauri had done no such thing: he had merely asked, politely and mildly, for the false allegations to be corrected.

Repeatedly stonewalled when he tried to clear his name, Pachauri found he had no option but to instruct a firm of libel lawyers. Now, after months of refusing to back down, the Sunday Telegraph accepted the KPMG finding that Pachauri has not made “millions of dollars” in recent years and has apologised to him.

Because the issue took so long to resolve, the total legal costs for the paper – the fees for its own lawyers and Pachauri’s – run into six figures.

Has the Sunday Telegraph’s apology solved the problem? Some hope.

North has reacted to it with a new blogpost, also widely reproduced on the web, in which he refers to the Sunday Telegraph apology as a “non-apology”. He claims: “the article was sound, all the substantive facts are correct and the paper stands by them.”

He goes on to suggest that Pachauri was indeed “corrupt or abusing his position as head of the IPCC” and maintains that the accusation that Pachauri has made millions of dollars “stands uncorrected”. North fails to provide any evidence to support this falsified claim.

North also suggests that Pachauri’s hiring of a firm of libel lawyers in order to obtain this apology “tells you all you need to know” about him. In reality it tells you that Pachauri had exhausted his other options. He was desperate to put the record straight, but despite the incontrovertible evidence he provided, which showed that the story was false, the paper had refused to published a retraction. Pachauri threatened legal proceedings as a last resort.

So what can Pachauri do? There is now a large community of people – those who deny that man-made climate change is taking place – who appear to be out to get him. His crime is being chairman of the IPCC. That, as far as they are concerned, makes him guilty of any charge they wish to throw at him. They appear determined to keep repeating the falsehoods they have been circulating since December. We can expect this smear campaign to continue, and to become ever more lurid as new charges are invented.

The best we can do is to set out the facts and appeal to whatever decency the people spreading these lies might have, and ask them to consider the impact of what they have done to an innocent man. Will it work? I wouldn’t bet on it. As we have seen in the United States, where some people (often the same people) continue to insist that Barack Obama is a Muslim and was born abroad, certain views are impervious to evidence.

By Stephen Leahy

VIENNA, Aug 11, 2010 (IPS) – A wind turbine on an acre of northern Iowa farmland could generate 300,000 dollars worth of greenhouse-gas-free electricity a year. Instead, the U.S. government pays out billions of dollars to subsidise grain for ethanol fuel that has little if any impact on global warming, according to Lester Brown.
“The smartest thing the U.S. could do is phase out ethanol subsidies,” says Brown, the founder of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute, in reference to rising food prices resulting from the unprecedented heat wave in western Russia that has decimated crops and killed at least 15,000 people.

“The lesson here is that we must take climate change far more seriously, make major cuts in emissions and fast before climate change is out of control,” Brown, one of the world’s leading experts on agriculture and food, told IPS.

Average temperatures during the month of July were eight degrees Celsius above normal in Moscow, he said, noting that “such a huge increase in temperature over an entire month is just unheard of.”

On Monday, Moscow reached 37 C when the normal temperature for August is 21 C. It was the 28th day in a row that temperatures exceeded 30 C.

Soil moisture has fallen to levels seen only once in 500 years, says Brown. Wheat and other grain yields are expected to decline by 40 percent or more in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine – regions that provide 25 percent of the world’s wheat exports. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced a few days ago that Russia would ban all grain exports.

Food prices will rise but how much is not known at this point, says Brown. “What we do know, however, is that the prices of wheat, corn, and soybeans are actually somewhat higher in early August 2010 than they were in early August 2007, when the record-breaking 2007-08 run-up in grain prices began.”

Emissions of greenhouse gases like CO2 from burning fossil fuels trap more of the sun’s energy. Climate experts expected the number and intensity of heat waves and droughts to increase as a result. In 2009, heat and fire killed hundreds in Australia during the worst drought in more than century, which devastated the country’s agriculture sector. In 2003, a European heat wave killed 53,000 people but as it occurred late in the summer crop, yields were not badly affected.

If a heat wave like Russia’s were centred around the grain- producing regions near Chicago or Beijing, the impacts could be many times worse because each of these regions produce five times the amount of grain as Russia does, says Brown. Such an event could result in the loss of 100 to 200 million tonnes of grain with unimaginable affects on the world’s food supply.

“Russia’s heat wave is a wake-up call to the world regarding the vulnerability of the global food supply,” he said.

The global climate is warming and most food crops are both heat and drought sensitive. Rice yield growth rates have already fallen by 10-20 percent over the last 25 years in parts of Thailand, Vietnam, India and China due to global warming, new research has shown. Data from 227 fully- irrigated farms that grow “green revolution” crops are suffering significant yield declines due to warming temperatures at night, researchers found.

“As nights get hotter, rice yields drop,” reported Jarrod Welch of the University of California at San Diego and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Aug. 9. Previous studies have shown this result in experimental plots, but this is the first under widespread, real-world conditions.

With such pressures on the world’s food supply it is simply wrong-headed to use 25 percent of U.S. grain for ethanol as a fuel for cars, said Brown.

“Ethanol subsidies must be phased out and real cuts in carbon emissions made and urgently,” he said.

Julie Packard, Executive Director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium

Huffington Post: July 16, 2010 10:40 AM

The oil blowout that’s fouled the Gulf of Mexico since April is many things: a human tragedy, an environmental disaster and a wake-up call.

But it’s not the greatest crisis facing the oceans today. We’ll be dealing with the gushing oil and its aftermath for years, but we can’t be distracted from Ocean Enemy No. 1: the grave threat of accelerating global climate change caused by the carbon pollution that people produce.

The list of victims of the oil gushing in the Gulf grows daily: sea turtles, whale sharks, seabirds and so many people whose lives and livelihoods depend on healthy seas. Their stories have deservedly found places in the daily headlines and people are responding.

At the same time, other sobering news is flying under the radar. These are stories of new scientific research that underscores the urgency of addressing climate change.

Consider:

A recent research report published in the journal Science concludes that man-made greenhouse gases are driving irreversible and dramatic changes to the way the ocean functions at the most basic level, with potentially dire impacts for hundreds of millions of people across the planet.

The article summarizes findings from dozens of peer-reviewed studies on the impacts of climate change on ocean ecosystems. Already, ocean warming, rising sea levels and acidification are changing ocean life as we know it at scales that range from altering the rate of larval fish development to increasing vast nutrient-poor regions known as ocean deserts.

Co-author Dr. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the Global Change Institute in Australia warns that, “We are entering a period in which the very ocean services upon which humanity depends are undergoing massive change and in some cases beginning to fail. Further degradation will continue to create enormous challenges and costs for societies worldwide.”

Perhaps most striking is the finding that the pace of these changes is expected to accelerate over time. For example, as the oceans warm, nutrient mixing that drives phytoplankton productivity is subsiding, in turn weakening the ocean’s huge role in absorbing excess CO2 from our atmosphere.

Co-author Dr. John Bruno of the University of North Carolina (and a fellow blogger at Huffington Post), issued a blunt warning:

What strikes me the most about the recent science coming out on this topic, is the degree to which we are modifying fundamental physical and biological processes by warming the oceans.And the big surprise, at least to me, is how quickly this is all happening. We are actually witnessing these changes before we predict or model them. This isn’t theoretical; this is a huge, real-world problem. Moreover, we, not just our children, will be paying the price if we don’t get a handle on this problem very soon.

As expected, the authors also make the point that there are far fewer studies of climate change impacts on the oceans when compared to terrestrial ecosystem studies. How strange, but not surprising, that we haven’t made a larger commitment to understanding the largest ecosystems on our planet.

Still, despite our terrestrial bias when it comes to research funding, our nation’s ocean scientists have accumulated an impressive amount of data on effects of climate change on our oceans, including many measurements like sea level and ocean pH that are not a matter of speculation: They can be measured with a simple instrument every day.

For sure, we’ll be in for a lot of surprises in the future when it comes to climate change and its impact on our lives. There’s simply no way to model, predict or understand every detail; but, there’s plenty of evidence in our hands today, and there’s no excuse for inaction.

Clearly, we have a lot of work to do — and little time to act. I’m an optimistic person by nature, and I’m encouraged by all of you who are raising your voices and demanding action from our leaders. Grassroots efforts such as writing letters, sending emails and making phone calls to your elected officials do matter and are among the most important ways we bring about change.

Together, I’m confident we can address the challenges and make a difference – for our lives, for our children, and for the oceans.

By Paul Gilding | July 12th, 2010 | Category: Cockatoo Chronicles

Beware the coming climate storm. A moment is approaching when science and markets will collide, but then merge, with chilling consequences for investors who miss the moment, and great excitement for those who are well prepared.

The signs are all around us now. Signs that a storm of climate action will soon rage through the economy, sweeping away denial and, along with it, those companies, politicians, investors and industries that aren’t ready.

Signs like our past two Prime Ministers and opposition leaders  in Australia being removed with climate change a central issue in their downfalls. Signs like 2008 being the first year when the money invested globally in new renewable energy generation projects was greater than that invested in new fossil fuel energy generation. Signs like the last decade being the hottest on record, as of course each decade has been since 1980. Signs like the first new car company IPO in the USA for half a century being a disruptive electric car company.

There is great investment and excitement now in renewables, with over $100 billion invested in 2008 and the same in 2009, despite the uncertain financial climate. Yet we see growth in coalmines, new coal export facilities and a lack of action in politics in Australia and the US. What is an investor to do with such confusing signals?

Simple. Observe the science, because the science drives everything else.

The facts are now very straightforward on the problem and its causes, as stated by the peak US science body The National Academies of Sciences. They said last month the science of climate change is in the category of those theories that had “been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts.”

So this is not a philosophy or a political viewpoint. These are facts. Smart investors deal in rational analysis, not ideological perspectives or wishful thinking. As US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”

So if you believe in facts, you will be understand that science will, in the end, overcome resistance and denial, as argued by Professor Stephan Lewandowsky from the University of Western Australia: “The laws of physics will relentlessly assert themselves, unswayed by public opinion, political shenanigans, or elections. Ultimately, the laws of physics will speak so loudly that no amount of wishful thinking can prevent them from being heard.”

The reason we can be so confident that this storm, when it hits, will be ferocious and effective at driving change, is by considering what happens when science meets markets. The science dictates that when we act it will now have to be dramatic action.

We know that to avoid catastrophic risk we must keep warming below two degrees and, as a result, this is the target agreed to by governments from US, to China, to India to Australia. If you don’t like political metrics then consider that this is also the target endorsed by hundreds of global corporations from GE to Rio to HSBC.

Acting as late as we are, achieving this target will require us to virtually eliminate CO2 emissions from coal oil and gas within a few decades. This means eliminating whole industries and replacing them, which is where the science meets the market.

Markets are particularly good at challenges like this, using what Austrian economist Joseph Schumpter called “creative destruction”. Markets are unconcerned about collateral damage and friendly fire. They won’t deliver the change steadily or calmly. Markets don’t play politics and will have no regard for sunk capital or prior commitments.

When we act on climate this will be creative destruction on steroids, with the resulting economic storm wreaking havoc and wiping out companies and whole sectors, while creating tomorrow’s new economy and corporate giants. It will be volatile, chaotic and exciting for investors, with fortunes made and lost based on the quality of judgements.

It’s hard to look at today’s politics and investment strategies and accept this analysis. It’s hard to imagine so many people being so wrong. It was also hard to imagine, in 2007, that the world’s governments would nationalise banks and car companies and spend trillions bailing out the financial system. It was hard to imagine, in the USA in 1940, that the coming four years would see military spending go from 1.6 per cent to 37 per cent of GDP and that government would take over and direct the economy, with actions like banning the production of private vehicles. In hindsight, though, such things are always obvious. And with the benefit of hindsight in 10 years time, the coming climate storm will have been obvious as well.

There is only question you have to ask yourself when you see the signals that are now flashing in bright neon lights, screaming “warning, warning, everything is about to change”. Am I ready?

Ove and I just published an op-ed in the News and Observer here titled “In the oceans, the heat is really on”.  The graphic that really says it all:

Redrawn by John Cook with data from Murphy, D. M., S. Solomon, R. W. Portmann, K. H. Rosenlof, P. M. Forster, and T. Wong. 2009. An observationally based energy balance for the Earth since 1950. J. Geophys. Res. 114:D17107. doi:10.1029/2009JD012105

The oceans are choking on greenhouse gases. Our emissions are changing ocean temperature, pH and circulation with wide-ranging effects on biological productivity and ecosystem health. These are among the conclusions of five review articles published in a special feature on the oceans in a recent issue of Science magazine.

The world is saturated by coverage of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Yet the impacts of this tragedy are localized, short-term and trivial compared to the broader effects of climate change.

The oil spill has damaged the lives and businesses of many innocent people. Remarkably, however, every day we are releasing several thousand times as much carbon as the Gulf spill by driving, flying and consuming and by heating and cooling our energy-inefficient houses. Hundreds of years from now, when BP is forgotten and the gulf wetlands have healed, ocean life will still be affected by the fossil fuels we are burning today.

Nearly all of the debate – or at least what is depicted in the media as a debate – about global warming has focused on land surface temperatures. However, over 85 percent of the extra energy trapped by soaring greenhouse gases has gone into the ocean.

We all call this man-made catastrophe “global warming” or “climate change,” but “ocean warming” and “ocean change” are really more descriptive of what is happening.

One value of the Gulf spill is that it has highlighted how tightly coupled the health of ecosystems and human economic well-being really are. In retrospect, the costs of preventing the spill by installing more reliable safety systems are paltry in comparison to the economic losses in the tourism and fisheries sectors. The same is true for mitigating climate change. Responses that cost less than 1 percent of GDP growth over the next few decades are matched against massive impacts on people and industry, especially in coastal areas of the world.

Greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly changing the physical properties and key biological process in the ocean. For example, declining primary productivity is affecting ocean food webs, fisheries and the ability of the ocean to naturally absorb and store greenhouse gases.

Other ominous signs loom. Deepwater dead zones have expanded, probably due to both local nutrient pollution as well as climate change. The melting of Arctic sea ice will allow thousands of species from the north Pacific to colonize the Atlantic. This will be the first mixing of the distinct biota of these regions in nearly a million years. Similar changes are expected in Antarctica, where warming is enabling marine predators to invade shallow-water ecosystems for which the freezing temperatures have been an effective barrier for 40 million years.

To avoid these uncertain worlds, a growing number of scientists from a range of fields have advocated that we keep the concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide below 450 ppm (parts per million). To achieve this, we need to cut global emissions by 5 percent per annum starting right now.

A tall order. However, we have no other alternative given the extremely high costs of inaction.

The good news is that there are plenty of solutions at hand, including investment in renewable energy systems or avoiding deforestation. National support for creating competitive renewable energy supplies would cause the required changes to ripple through global economies. Halting deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia would eliminate nearly 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Protecting and restoring coastal vegetation, including mangroves, salt marsh and sea grasses – dubbed “blue carbon” – would maintain or increase the ability of marine ecosystems to capture and permanently store carbon dioxide. Furthermore, all of these solutions have huge benefits for people and biodiversity.

The world’s scientists are calling for society and policymakers to wake up to the perils of our current greenhouse gas emission pathway. This is not merely the consensus of scientists; it is a consensus of evidence. Inaction might be justified if the impacts were trivial or there was nothing we could do to avoid these catastrophic futures. However, with so many affordable solutions in front of the world’s nations, continued inaction is no longer an excuse.

UPDATE:  See the facts and figures about The Australian’s war on Science over at Deltoid.

No doubt you will remember The Australian’s infamous front page story that was exposed on Media Watch by Jonathan Holmes.  Well, it seems that the poor journalism continues at The Australian.  In a front page article entitled “U.N.’s climate report ‘one-sided‘, Ben Webster tries to claim that the Dutch study has revealed serious errors in the IPCC fourth assessment report.

Well, it seems that Ben and The Australian got it all backwards yet again.

The Dutch study actually concludes the complete opposite – that statements within the “impacts, adaptation and vulnerability” section of the IPCC AR4 report were “well founded and none were found to contain any significant errors”. The Dutch study recommended a number of ways to strengthen upcoming reports and eliminate a number of small errors which cropped up.

Was Ben off reading right-wing fossil fuel funded blogs again?  Or was it a case of the ‘ole let’s make up the news when it gets to be all too boring?

What is truly remarkable is that The Australian tries to imply that the report also concluded that the evidence concerning the extreme risk of climate change to Great Barrier Reef was “alarmist”.  A careful reading of the report reveals that the study did not conclude that evidence or the conclusions were alarmist.  Rather, it pointed to a couple of slightly inaccurate references to the peer-reviewed literature.  In fact, it concludes after doing so that “We consider this to be a minor comment”.

Talking to the experts, you find that few have problems with the IPCC statement that “60 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef was projected to suffer regular bleaching by 2020 “. You see, we already are. We have had bleaching since 1979 (and none before) with significant recent events in 1998, 2002 and 2006.  Sounds regular to me!  In several of these events (1998, 2002), more than 50% of the Great Barrier Reef has been affected.

Of course, Australia’s Andrew Bolt has responded with his mirror of this misinformation. Helpful fellow that he is.

Where has Ben Webster and the Australian been? The real shame here is the erosion of trust that we can place in one of our leading papers. With a repeated offences like this like this, why would you read The Australian?  Certainly, not if you wanted to get the facts on any particular issue!

To really understand what the Dutch report says, we recommend readers go to the original report or a rational report such as that in the leading international science magazine, Nature.  Here is what Reuters had to say:

Few fishy facts found in climate report

Dutch investigation supports key warnings from the IPCC’s most recent assessment.

Quirin Schiermeier

05 Jul 2010 14:22:00 GMT

Written by: Laurie Goering

Rajendra Pachauri, head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has defended his science body’s work, saying any errors in its reports were minor. A new Dutch report agrees with that assessment. REUTERS/Bob Strong

In the latest of a series of reports backing the validity of work by leading climate scientists, the Dutch government said Monday that a review of a key report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had found no significant errors.

The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency took a look at the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, a 2007 study considered the basis for understanding climate change science, following criticism that the report had in several instances exaggerated climate impacts.

IPCC officials admitted one important mistake – an exaggeration of the rate of melting of Himalayan glaciers – but noted that the error shouldn’t be used to invalidate the rest of the 3,000-page report.

The Netherlands government agreed with that conclusion in its study of the “impacts, adaptation and vulnerability” section of the report, which looks at regional impacts of climate change.

Reviewers found that statements in the section are “well founded and none were found to contain any significant errors,” though some minor errors cropped up. They issued a set of recommendations on how to strengthen upcoming reports, with a view to eradicating such mistakes.

Representatives of the thousands of leading international climate scientists who volunteer their time to produce the reports called the Dutch study a validation of their work, which won a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

“The review is explicit in its finding that the key conclusions of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report are accurate, correct and supported entirely by the leading science in the field,” said Martin Parry, co-chair of the team that produced the “impacts, adaptation and vulnerability” section of the 2007 report.

Climate scientists, under broad attack by sceptics of climate change science, have in recent weeks enjoyed a welcome series of victories. Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University climate scientist embroiled in a high-profile stolen email scandal at the University of East Anglia, was exonerated of charges of research misconduct and ethical lapses last week after a review by his university.

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