Climate science panel needs change at top, report finds

WASHINGTON — Scientists reviewing the acclaimed but beleaguered international climate change panel called Monday for major changes in the way it's run, but stopped short of calling for the ouster of the current leader.

The independent review of the U.N. climate change panel puts new pressure on panel chairman Rajendra Pachauri, who has been criticized for possible conflicts of interest, but shows no sign of stepping down.

"It's hard to see how the United Nations can both follow the advice of this committee and keep Rajendra Pachauri on board as head," said Roger Pielke Jr., a frequent critic of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The professor at University of Colorado praised the review findings as a way of saving the climate panel with "tough love."

Representatives of the world's science academies outlined a series of "significant reforms" in management structure needed by the IPCC, a body that won a Nobel Prize with former Vice President Al Gore in 2007.

Last year, a batch of errors embarrassed the authors of the climate report. Among the most prominent were misleading statements about glaciers in the Himalayas. The IPCC incorrectly said they were melting faster than others and that they would disappear by 2035 — hundreds of years earlier than other information suggests.

"Those errors did dent the credibility of the process, no question about it," said former Princeton University president Harold Shapiro, who led the review of the IPCC.

Pachauri, an academic from India who also is a professor at Yale, said many of the specific recommendations outlined are ones that he already has started. Critics, including those in the U.S. Senate, have called upon him to resign, but on Monday he gave no indication he would.

"This has nothing to do with personalities," Pachauri told The Associated Press. "I think we're jumping the gun if we're talking about taking any action before the IPCC takes a look at the report."

Shapiro said if fundamental changes are made, the IPCC — created in 1989 by the United Nations and World Meteorological Organization — can regain its credibility. The IPCC involves scientists mostly volunteering work with only 10 staffers, and even Pachauri is a part-time volunteer.

The 113-page review was requested by the IPCC and the UN after the errors were found. It didn't look at the quality of the science itself, only how it was produced. Shapiro said the science behind the climate report was still credible, telling The Associated Press, "All the key recommendations that are really important are well supported by the scientific evidence."