IPCC head ­Rajendra Pachauri says the UN panel's next report must make sure "errors of any kind are completely eliminated"Scientists have reacted with dismay at a letter sent out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) advising them not to talk to journalists. The letter was published just two days before the publication of a review of the "Climategate" affair that criticized researchers at the University of East Anglia for lacking openness.IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri sent the letter on 5 July to each of the 831 experts selected to take part in preparing the panel's fifth assessment report (AR5) on climate change. This report is due to be published in 2013 and 2014 and follows on from the fourth assessment released in 2007, which concluded that global warming is real and very likely due to increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to human activities. The assessment exercise is made up of three working groups that will deal with the fundamental science and impacts of climate change as well as mitigation and adaptation strategies.In his letter Pachauri wrote that increased scrutiny of the IPCC "imposes on us a heavy responsibility to see that errors of any kind are completely eliminated from the AR5" and that as a result the panel would have to "work diligently and with a level of rigour perhaps not seen in previous reports". (The IPCC having come under heavy criticism earlier this year for erroneously stating in the 1997 report that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.) Pachauri then went on to offer his "sincere advice" that researchers "keep a distance from the media" and that any questions about that researcher's working group be directed to the co-chairs of that group while general queries about the IPCC should be forwarded to the panel's secretariat.Peter Cox, a climate modeller at the University of Exeter in the UK and a member of the science working group, believes that Pachauri's advice is fairl ...

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