NEW DELHI — The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has presented a robust defence of its claim that the world had ‘suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather related events since the 1970s’ partly on account of global warming. This was part of the Fourth Assessment Report of 2007. Media reports suggested that the UN climate panel had wrongly linked global warming to a rise in natural disasters. According to the report in UK’s Sunday Times, IPCC based its claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny. Further that the UN panel knew in 2008 that the link between extreme weather related events and global warming could not be proved but it did not alert world leaders. The IPCC in a statement said that the section where the controversial paper was used had a ‘number of qualifiers’ and the overall report was a balanced treatment of the issue that came to a number of conclusions about the role of climate change in natural disasters. The UN panel described the media report as a ‘baseless attack on the section of the report on trends in insurance losses from disasters. ‘This […]