The head of the UN panel on climate change...

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently admitted it made a mistake in its 2007 assessment of the rates of glacier melting in the Himalayas.

"I am not going to stand down, I am going to stand up," the BBC quoted Rajendra Pachauri as saying.

The IPCC"s Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 said that Himalayan glaciers were receding at an unprecedented speed and could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035. The statement was widely disputed by the global scientific community.

A group of experts has recently found that the report was based on a 2005 World Wide Fund for Nature report on glaciers, a 1996 UNESCO document on hydrology, and a 1999 news article in the New Scientist magazine, rather than on reliable scientific data.

They also discovered that the gloomy assessment misread the 1996 study by leading Russian researcher Vladimir Kotlyakov, who gave the date as 2350.

Pachauri said the inclusion of the 2035 date in the report,

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