Rajendra Pachauri is staying on as chairman of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) but it agreed to make some other changes to try and prevent future mistakes in its widely watched climate-science reports, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The InterAcademy Council (IAC), which represented several national science academies, had called for a wide range of reforms, including shortening the tenure of the chairman, but the IPCC did not go that far.
The IPCC agreed to several recommendations from the council, including tighter policies to reflect scientific uncertainty in its reports and to ferret out and fix any errors in them, panel officials said. In particular, it will be more careful about ensuring that it lays out the evidence for any assertion it makes about the likelihood of any effect of climate change, said Chris Field, a U.S. scientist and a leader of the panel's 2014 report.In the past, he said, IPCC reports sometimes projected the likelihood of potential climate-change effects, such as melting glaciers, without enough evidence. "There were some weaknesses in the application," he said.
To the BBC, he was more blunt - "The fact of the matter is that climate change impacts are very poorly known. We only have mature scientific studies for a small number of topics and
a small number of places, so we need to recognise that and figure out
how, in an environment where the information is limited, we can still
provide valuable information."
The IAC criticized how that poorly known information was portrayed: "Authors reported high confidence in statements for which there is
little evidence, such as the widely-quoted statement that agricultural
yields in Africa might decline by up to 50 percent by 2020," it noted.
Pachauri's news conference said that the IPCC had endorsed his continuing as chairman through the completion of the panel's next major climate-science report, the Fifth Assessment Report. "I have every intention of staying right till I've completed the mission that I've accepted to carry out—namely, the completion of the Fifth Assessment Report in 2014."
The UN is considering limiting the terms, of course, they just wouldn't apply to him because he is currently seated.
If only BP were a UN organization, Carl-Henric Svanberg could still be Chairman there too.
