The Australian
Source: AFP
Cancun, Mexico: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has listened to and learned from recent criticism, but the threat of global warming is real and must be tackled, the group's head said yesterday.
Rajendra Pachauri, the embattled head of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning panel of experts, has been criticised for endorsing climate projections based on faulty or inaccurate evidence.
"There's been a lot of talking about climate change. It's an area under strict scrutiny,'' he acknowledged at a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank. "We at the IPCC, we've listened, we've learnt, we've done something about it.''
He defended the panel's much-criticised fourth assessment report, which he said "has a great deal of robust material and findings''.
The report has been pilloried for claiming erroneously that the Himalayan glaciers were in imminent danger of melting. The group has also been forced on to the offensive by a series of email exchanges made public by a hacker that appear to show climate experts seeking to hide or misrepresent evidence.
Joining Mr Pachauri was Yvo de Boer, the UN official who headed efforts to secure a new international agreement on climate change, but announced his resignation after a major summit on a new deal in Copenhagen last year.
Mr De Boer urged progress in the follow-up summit to Copenhagen, to be held in Cancun in November.
He said funding for the fight against climate change would be a major hurdle to overcome, and warned that a proposed $US100 billion ($109bn) fund to help developing nations tackle global warming would be difficult to fund solely through contributions from rich nations.
"There's a large perception, especially in the developing world, that the entire $US100bn , it's going to come from public financing. I think that extremely unlikely, I don't see industrialised countries . . . mobilising another $US100bn a year for climate change,'' he said.
He also said the Cancun conference would need to address the challenge of managing and distributing funds.
"If in Mexico we can make a significant advance in terms of addressing the resources mobilisation, the resources management and the resources disbursement challenges in a way that effectively blends public and private finance towards the development priorities of developing countries, we'll probably have resolved the most difficult issue in this entire process.''