In separate statements of regret and remorse, the IPCC and World Wildlife Fund have confessed to their parts in getting unsupported statements about disappearing glaciers into the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report.
The IPCC refer in their press release to "poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers" to which one might be tempted to add the words "not credible in the first place".
The reason for the lapse was, apparently, non-adherence to IPCC rules:
In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly. The Chair, Vice-Chairs, and Co-chairs of the IPCC regret the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures in this instance. This episode demonstrates that the quality of the assessment depends on absolute adherence to the IPCC standards, including thorough review of “the quality and validity of each source before incorporating results from the source into an IPCC Report” 3. We reaffirm our strong commitment to ensuring this level of performance.
This is an interesting admission, particularly for me, having just written a book that touches on several issues of failings in IPCC procedures and unbalanced statements finding their way into IPCC reports.
Meanwhile, WWF are also very sorry:
At the time the WWF report was issued, we believed the source of the statement to be reliable and accurate.
We regret any confusion caused by our role in repeating the erroneous quote in the 2005 report and in subsequent publications and statements.
As the world’s leading science-based conservation organisation, WWF is strongly committed to ensuring the information we provide to the public is thoroughly reviewed to meet the highest standards of accuracy.
Oops! On the same lines, Roger Pielke Jnr has posted a particularly egregious example of IPCC authors simply making things up. When a reviewer thought that Pielke Jnr's views should be sought on a question of hurricane damage in the USA, instead of actually asking him, the chapter authors simply inserted a statement as follows:
I believe Pielke agrees that adding 2004 and 2005 has the potential to change his earlier conclusions – at least about the absence of a trend in US Cat losses.
What makes their error even worse was that Pielke had previously made it clear that he believed no such thing.
This looks very bad.
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