By Chris Morris
BBC News, Delhi
**Senior officials running UN-led talks in India have insisted climate change science remains very persuasive despite the emergence of recent serious errors.**Scientists, politicians and business leaders are meeting in Delhi for the first big conference on climate change since the Copenhagen summit last year.
The head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said a huge volume of evidence validated the science.
Rajendra Pachauri said there had been only one major error in an IPCC study.
The error - about the rate of melting of Himalayan glaciers - had been publicly corrected, Dr Pachauri said.
Himalayas glacier deadline ‘wrong’](http://www.paklinks.com/2/low/south_asia/8387737.stm)
He spoke of lies being published in British newspapers about him personally and about the work of the IPCC.
UN climate change envoy Yvo de Boer has also defended the IPCC, calling its work robust.
It is, he said, underpinning political decision making in a very, very serious way.
But after the failure of the Copenhagen summit to reach a comprehensive agreement on tackling climate change, this has been a bad start to the new year for the UN negotiating process.
The hope is that an agreement can finally be reached at the next major climate summit in Mexico City later this year.
But for the moment, controversy has taken centre stage, and it has added fuel to the arguments of sceptics who believe global warming theories are alarmist.