'IPCC based ice report on student essay'

LONDON: The UN climate change panel based claims about ice disappearing from the world's mountain peaks on an essay by a student and an anecdotal article in a mountaineering magazine, a British newspaper reported on Sunday.

The claims risk causing fresh embarrassment for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC), which apologized this month over inaccurate forecasts about the melting of Himalayan glaciers and promised to reassess claims of a link between global warming and rise in the occurrence of natural disasters.

In a recent report, the IPCC stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was caused by global warming and it referred to two papers as the source of the information. The Sunday Telegraph said one of the sources quoted was an article published in a magazine for mountaineers which was based on anecdotal evidence about the changes they were witnessing during climbs.

The newspaper said the other source was a dissertation written by a geography student who was studying for a master's degree at the University of Bern in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

Barely a week ago, The Sunday Times, London, had reported that the IPCC's claims of a link between global warming and rise in incidence and severity of natural disasters, including hurricanes and floods. The newspaper said the panel based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny - and ignored warnings from scientific advisers. The report's author later withdrew the claim because the evidence was too weak.

The link was central to demands at last month's Copenhagen climate summit by African nations for compensation of $100 billion from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions. The newspaper quoted IPCC vice-chair Jean-Pascal van Ypersele as saying that the IPCC was reassessing the evidence at hand.

That claim was preceded by the IPCC's apology for the "poor application of well-established IPCC procedures" in a report on the melting of Himalayan glaciers that said they could all vanish by 2035. The report, it was revealed, was based on a news report in the New Scientist in which an Indian scientist made a "speculation" when interviewed.