Well Duh: IPCC Is Right About Climate Change

by Nikki Gloudeman · 2010-07-06 05:25:00 UTC
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What a great month for climate science.

First, just last week, a scientist pilloried during the "Climategate" e-mail controversy was cleared of wrongdoing by Penn State University.

Now comes more good news: Yesterday, the lead Netherlands' environmental agency issued a review of the the inaccuracy charges in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Their conclusion? Some mistakes were made, but the science wins the day: The report is on the money when it says that man-made climate change is real and threatening.

A barrage of climate critics stirred up controversy last year by lambasting two discrepancies in a document more some 3,000 pages long. Noted: Himalayan glaciers will probably melt by 2350, not 2035, as stated in the report. Noted: only 26 percent of the Netherlands is below sea level, not 55 percent, as stated in the report. The Netherlands new assessment found one more: Fewer Africans will be affected by water shortages in the next decade than IPCC would have us believe.

Are these three errors enough to undermine the report's central conclusion: global warming, and its damaging effects, is a big deal for our planet and people can stop it? Of course not. Now, the Dutch have officially agreed.

That said, it's regrettable that any mistakes were made in the seminal report, especially considering the fact-checkers had to be aware of the bloodthirsty denialist machine and the sensationalist hunger of the 24/7 news cycle. To a certain extent, errors in the 3,000-page document were inevitable; as the Dutch stated, mistakes "seem in actual practice unavoidable." What's more, errors could have been avoided had the IPCC been more thorough and careful in its documentation. Specifically, the Dutch report recommended more transparency and better quality control to curb errors down the road.

With the next IPCC report currently in progress and slated for completion in 2013, let's hope that counsel is taken to heart as quickly as possible. The last thing we need is, three years down the road, to be still having these ridiculous debates that distract from the serious problem at hand.

Photo credit: Flickr/cherrylynx (Creative Commons)

Nikki Gloudeman is a senior fellow at Mother Jones magazine where she writes about the environment and other topics.
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