An umbrella organization of the world's science academies will release on Monday an assessment of the work of a United Nations panel on climate change, which was criticized for a claim that the Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035 and other findings. At issue is a set of continuing findings by the UN's climate-watch body, the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has also predicted that climate change could destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon and that agricultural yields in some African countries could be halved in a decade, according to dpa. Critics charge that the IPCC's controversial claims were not backed by science and that IPCC's processes and procedures must be reviewed. The attacks against IPCC became world headlines last November when thousands of email exchanges among climate scientists were hacked from a computer server of a research center at the University of East Anglia in Britain. The hacked emails seemed to strengthen the critics' position, and their public charges against the IPCC scientists spawned a new concept for the controversy: "climategate." UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon requested an investigation of the flap by the Inter-Academy Council (IAC) in Amsterdam, the umbrella organization, which will issue its review on Monday at UN headquarters in New York. The review, which is still confidential, will be given to Ban and IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri. The IAC, which is hosted by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Science in Amsterdam, provides consultations from its top global scientists and engineers to international bodies like the UN and World Bank. The 2007 reports by the IPCC provoked anger and criticism from many business organizations and political conservatives, who disagreed that global warming was occurring and/or disputed that human activity was at fault. But between November and July this year, five independent studies by universities in the United States as well as Britain came to the defence of the IPCC findings that put the blame on carbon emissions stemming from human activity. Britain's House of Commons' Science and Technologies Committee and Washington's Environmental Protection Administration also defended the IPCC findings. The Pennsylvania State University cleared one of its scientists whose emails were hacked of accusations that he had contributed to faulty science. In May, the US National Academy of Sciences reaffirmed that "scientific evidence that the earth is warming is now overwhelming" and that it is "most likely" caused by human activities.
