The IPCC and the WWF

A couple of weeks ago it came out that part of the IPCC's 2007 report was exaggerated. The report claimed that Himalayan glaciers would melt completely by 2035 and it claimed a 90% confidence in that claim. It turned out that this claim started as an off-the-cuff remark by an activist. It was included in an article and picked up by a position paper put out by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). The truth is that it is impossible for the glaciers to melt that fast and only a small subset of the Himalayan glaciers are even being monitored.

The IPCC claimed that this was a last-minute addition to the report which had bypassed the normal review process. That left the hanging question, was this an isolated incident? The answer is that it was not isolated.

The IPCC report claimed that 40% of the world's rain forests will be destroyed by global warming. The basis for this claim? Another paper produced by the WWF. Again, the WWF quoted a paper that was fundamentally flawed. In this case, it used figures from logging and drought and applied them to climate.

When the IPCC report report was released in 2007, there were rumors that the original draft hadn't been scary enough and that they were under pressure to make global warming sound much more dangerous and to assign confidence levels to the findings. I'm going to take the IPCC's word that the glacier claim was a last-minute addition and I'm going to speculate that the rain forest claim was a similar late addition.

The implication is that the original report was not going to force governments to make fundamental and painful changes. The authors of the various chapters were told to go back and include worst-case projections as the most likely. They may have been given a stack of WWF position papers. Regardless, bad information from pressure groups found its way into at least two chapters of the IPCC report.

It should come as no surprise that the WWF cherry-picks its figures to make a stronger case than the evidence supports. What is surprising is that anyone from the IPCC would rely on these papers. This should call into question everything in the IPCC report.

UPDATE: As I expected, there are dozens of places where the IPCC's only cited source is the WWF. See Donna Laframboise's blog for details.

UPDATE 2: Remember Climategate - the leaked emails from the prestigious Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University? The Guardian has poured through them and found that the figures the IPCC used for China were seriously flawed. China doesn't have a lot of weather stations. The question was how man of them were influenced by urban expansion as opposed to climate change. The IPCC relied on a paper that had problems. The words "screwed up" were used. This is the first real link between the leaked emails and the IPCC but, in the tiny world of climatologists, it probably will not be the last one.