An international scientific body will review the UN's climate panel, under fire from some quarters for errors in a key report on global warming, UN chief Ban Ki-moon has said.
Ban told reporters that the Amsterdam-based InterAcademy Council (IAC), which groups presidents of 15 leading science academies, will carry out the task "completely independently of the United Nations."
Deniers of man-made climate change have become more vocal in recent months. Trust in scientists has suffered, with the media's failure to explain key scientific concepts blamed for the drop in public support for the dominant theory.
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But Ban defended the work of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose chairman Rajendra Pachauri has been criticised for his stewardship of the body.
Last month, the United Nations announced that it would launch an independent review of the IPCC's work.
Ban said on Wednesday that the IAC would undertake "a comprehensive, independent review of the IPCC's procedures and processes" and would make recommendations to improve its future reports.
Robbert Dijkgraaf, an IAC co-chair, meanwhile told reporters that his panel aimed to present its report by the end of next August so that governments could consider it ahead of key climate
change meetings late this year.
With Pachauri by his side, Ban defended the overall work of the IPCC, despite what he called "a very small number of errors" in its fourth assessment report.
"I have seen no credible evidence that challenges the main conclusions of that report," Ban said.
China and India on board Copenhagen deal
Meanwhile, a seniore Chinese official has branded the view that climate change is not man made 'extreme', reports the ABC.
"The mainstream view is that climate change is caused by burning of fossil fuel in the course of industrialisation", Xie Zhenhua said, adding he felt the view that says human activity only has an imperceptible impact was 'more extreme.'
On Tuesday, China and India announced on they would back the 11th-hour climate accord hammered out in Copenhagen in December, removing doubts that the world's two most populous countries fully supported the contested deal.
Ahead of a January 31 deadline, China informed the UN of voluntary actions it planned to take to curb the carbon intensity of its economy.
But it did not give the accord the political endorsement of saying it sought to be "associated" with the deal, a step taken by all industrialised countries.
In a letter dated March 9, posted on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change website (UNFCCC), Beijing's top climate negotiator, Su Wei, instructed the UNFCCC to add China to the list of countries that support the agreement.
