The UN environment chief has come out in strong
support of the embattled climate change panel led by R K Pachauri,
hitting out at sceptics whose criticism of the body and its Indian
chair, he said, had reached ‘witch-hunting proportions’.
Contending that a ‘typographical error’ was at
the root of the glacier error, Achim Steiner said: “The IPCC is as
fallible as the human beings that comprise it.” The 2007 report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change erroneously claimed that the
Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. One original source of the
IPCC report, he mentioned, had spoken of the world's glaciers melting
by 2350, and not 2035 as came out in it, terming it a ‘typographical
error.’
The head of the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP) criticised the pundits and media who were rejecting
the reality of climate change blaming them for causing confusion among
the public. “Some strident voices are even dismissing climate change
as a hoax on a par with the Y2K computer bug”, he wrote in an op-ed
piece of the Turkish national daily, ‘Today's Zaman.’
“As a result, public has become increasingly
bewildered as unremitting questioning of the IPCC and its chair
assumes almost witch-hunting proportions in some quarters”, he added.
“Indeed, caution rather than sensation has been the panel’s watchword
throughout its existence”, Steiner wrote, defending the IPCC.
