The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been asked by the Dutch Government to review its claim that fifty-five percent of the Netherlands is below sea level. The IPCC has said that what it meant to say was that fifty-five percent of the country was at risk from flooding. The Dutch Government said that according to their figures only twenty-six percent of the Netherlands is actually below sea level.
The mistake follows the embarrassing revelation that the IPCC’s claim that the glaciers of the Himalayas would disappear completely by the year 2035 was based on a magazine interview with a little known scientist who had absolutely no research to back up his claim.
Further fuel has been given to climate change skeptics by leading scientists who have admitted that much of the data being collected from weather stations around the world may be contaminated. It is thought that any recorded increase in temperature may be due to local conditions such as changing land use and industrialisation rather than a global phenomenon.
Prominent climate change scientist Professor Phil Jones has found himself in the middle of what has been dubbed Climategate because he says that as far as his analysis of the data is concerned there has been no significant change in the temperature of our planet since 1995. Professor Jones had to step down from his position as the director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after emails were leaked which showed that he and his team had reworked data to make the climate change theory more convincing.