ANOTHER climate change blunder: First it's melting glaciers, now natural disaster claim is debunked

ANOTHER climate change blunder: First it's melting glaciers, now natural disaster claim is debunked

By Daniel Martin

Last updated at 8:08 AM on 25th January 2010

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The world's leading climate change scientists have been caught out making unfounded claims about global warming for the second time in just over a week.

Experts appointed by the United Nations said rising temperatures were to blame for an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

But it has emerged that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change based the statement, made in 2007, on an unpublished report that had not been properly reviewed by other scientists.

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The report's author has since withdrawn the claim, saying there is not enough evidence to link climate change to worsening natural disasters, and criticised the use of his data as 'completely misleading'.

It follows the IPCC's admission that it was wrong to state in its influential 2007 Fourth Assessment Report that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.

That assertion was based on ' speculation' featured in an eight-year-old article in New Scientist magazine.

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The latest revelation means more embarrassment for the climate change lobby because worsening natural disasters were a central plank of arguments at the recent UN climate summit in Copenhagen. Barack Obama used the claims when he said last autumn: 'More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.'

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Climate change minister Ed Miliband has claimed that floods such as those which devastated parts of Cumbria last year could be widespread if global warming goes unchecked.

He said last month: 'Events in Cumbria give a foretaste of the kind of weather runaway climate change could bring. Abroad, the melting of the Himalayan glaciers that feed the great rivers of south Asia could put millions of people at risk of drought.'

The IPCC's 2007 report said the world had 'suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s', suggesting global warming was to blame.

But the claim was taken from a then unpublished report by Robert Muir-Wood, head of research at London-based consultancy Risk Management Solutions.

When Dr Muir-Wood released the report he added the caveat: 'We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses [damage caused by natural disasters].'

The IPCC said it would investigate the false claim and could withdraw it.

Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice-chairman of the IPCC, said: 'We are re-assessing the evidence and will publish a report on natural disasters and extreme weather with the latest findings.'

Dr Muir-Wood attacked the way his evidence was used. He said: 'The idea that catastrophes are rising in cost partly because of climate change is completely misleading. We could not tell if it was just an association or cause and effect. 'Also, our study included 2004 and 2005 which was when there were some major hurricanes. If you took those years away then the significance of climate change vanished.'