Dutch agency finds more errors in UN climate report

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - A leading Dutch environmental agency, taking the blame for one of the glaring errors that undermined the credibility of a seminal UN report on climate change, said yesterday it has discovered more small mistakes and urged the panel to be more careful.

But the review by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency contended that none of the errors affected the fundamental conclusion by a UN panel of scientists: that global warming caused by humans is threatening the lives and well-being of millions of people.

Mistakes discovered in the 3,000-page report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year fed into an atmosphere of skepticism over the reliability of climate scientists who have been warning for many years that human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases could have catastrophic consequences, including rising sea levels, drought and the extinction of nearly one-third of the Earth's species.

The errors put scientists on the defensive in the months before a major summit on climate change in Copenhagen in December, which met with only limited success on agreeing how to limit carbon emissions and contain the worst effects of global warming.

The underlying IPCC conclusions remain valid, said Maarten Hajer, the Dutch agency's director. But he said the boiled-down version of the full IPCC report, a synthesis meant as a guideline for policymakers, included conclusions drawn from "expert judgments" that were not always clearly sourced or transparent.

The IPCC, in a statement from its Geneva headquarters, welcomed the agency's findings, which it said confirmed the IPCC's conclusion that "continued climate change will pose serious challenges to human well-being and sustainable development."

The Dutch agency accepted responsibility for one mistake by the IPCC when it reported in 2005 that 55 percent of the Netherlands is below sea level; in fact, only 26 percent is. The report should have said 55 percent is prone to flooding, including river flooding.

The second previously reported error was that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, which the Dutch agency traced partly to a report on the likely shrinking of glaciers by the year 2350.