Spread this around, as it nicely refutes the erroneous claim that the IPCC climate change science is not valid. Of course, it is. It also somewhat describes the process by which the reports are written.

Photo: Reuters A farmer shows a yellowing leaf of a vegetable seedling in a field in drought-hit Chenggong county, Yunnan province February 24, 2010.

Climate Scientists Defend IPCC Peer Review as Most Rigorous in History

by Stacy Feldman, Solve Climate (Feb. 26)

“The peer review process at the heart of the UN climate science panel is one of the most rigorous in the “history of science,” climate scientists said as they attempted to shore up trust in an institution that has been battered in the media.

It is hard to conceive of a more comprehensive and transparent process than that used by the IPCC,” said Neville Nicholls, a climate scientist and lead writer on parts of the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“An error in the 3,000-page IPCC report that exaggerated the rapid melting of the Himalayan glaciers has triggered claims of sloppiness in the panel’s peer-review procedures, and the UN said today it would appoint an independent panel to review the planet’s top climate science body.

“The world’s climate change skeptics have gone a step further, taking advantage of the gaffe to promote their point of view that global warming is not real.

Scientists say that the calls for substantial reform of the IPCC’s expert and government peer-review process by opponents are overkill.

“Peer review can certainly be trusted,” said Paul Beggs, a climate scientist from Australia’s Macquarie University. This is particularly true of the IPCC peer review process, he said, which is “arguably the most rigorous and transparent peer review process in the history of science.”

Nicholls, a professor at Monash University in Victoria, Australia, said the IPCC 2007 Fourth Assessment report was subjected to several rigorous tiers of review. The study cites over 10,000 papers from the scientific literature, “most of which have already been through the peer-review process to get into the scientific literature.”

The report went through four separate reviews and received 90,000 comments from 2,500 reviewers, all of which are publicly available, along with the responses of the authors, Nicholls said.

Kurt Lambeck, a geophysicist at the Australian National University and president of the Australian Academy of Science, said the Himalayan blunder is one of few that “slipped through.”

Occasional errors are not surprising, said Kevin Walsh, a professor of meteorology at the University of Melbourne.

“Even rigorous peer review can let things slip through, or assess work incompletely,” Walsh said. “It’s not surprising, therefore, that in the several thousand pages of the IPCC reports, a few problems have been found with the review process.”

The fact that the error did not make it into the report summary — which contains all the findings of importance [...]