African crops yield another catastrophe for the IPCC
One more alarming claim in the IPCC's 2007 report is disintegrating under
closer examination, says Christopher Booker
By Christopher Booker
Published: 7:36PM GMT 13 Feb 2010
Ever more question marks have been raised in recent weeks over the
reputations of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) and of its chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri. But the latest
example to emerge is arguably the most bizarre and scandalous of all.
It centres on a very specific scare story which was included in the
IPCC's 2007 report, although it was completely at odds with the
scientific evidence – including that produced by the British expert in
charge of the relevant section of the report. Even more tellingly,
however, this particular claim has repeatedly been championed by Dr
Pachauri himself.
Only last week Dr Pachauri was specifically
denying that the appearance of this claim in two IPCC reports,
including one of which he was the editor, was an error. Yet it has now
come to light that the IPCC, ignoring the evidence of its own experts,
deliberately published the claim for propaganda purposes.
One of the most widely quoted and most alarmist passages in the main
2007 report was a warning that, by 2020, global warming could reduce
crop yields in some countries in Africa by 50 per cent. Dr Pachauri not
only allowed this claim to be included in the short Synthesis Report,
of which he was co-editor, but has publicly repeated it many times
since.
The origin of this claim was a report written for a
Canadian advocacy group by Ali Agoumi, a Moroccan academic who draws
part of his current income from advising on how to make applications
for "carbon credits". As his primary sources he cited reports for three
North African governments. But none of these remotely supported what he
wrote. The nearest any got to providing evidence for his claim was one
for the Moroccan government, which said that in serious drought years,
cereal yields might be reduced by 50 per cent. The report for the
Algerian government, on the other hand, predicted that, on current
projections, "agricultural production will more than double by 2020".
Yet it was Agoumi's claim that climate change could cut yields by 50
per cent that was headlined in the IPCC's Working Group II report in
2007.
What made this even odder, however, was that the group's
co-chairman
was a British agricultural expert, Dr Martin Parry, whose consultancy
group, Martin Parry Associates, had been paid £75,000 by the Department
for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) for two reports which
had come to totally different conclusions. Specifically designed to
inform the IPCC's 2007 report, these predicted that by 2020 any changes
were likely to be insignificant. The worst case they could come up with
was that by 2080 climate change might decrease crop yields by "up to 30
per cent".
British taxpayers poured out money for the section of
the IPCC report for which Dr Parry was responsible. Defra paid
£2.5 million through the Met Office, plus £330,000 for Dr Parry's
salary as co-chairman, and a further £75,000 to his consultancy for two
more reports on the impact of global warming on world food supplies.
Yet when it came to the impact on Africa, all this peer-reviewed work –
including further expert reports by Britain's Dr Mike Hulme and Dutch
and German teams – was ignored in favour of a prediction from one
Moroccan activist at odds with his own cited sources.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7231386/African-crops-yield-another-catastrophe-for-the-IPCC.html