A Climate Report Brings
Dire Warnings, and Frustration
April 6, 2007 7:07 a.m.
An international panel of experts this morning finally reached agreement on the dire and globe-sweeping effects of global warming, but not before government participants managed to soften some of the language, to the exasperation of contributing scientists.
At midday, hours after the promised deadline, a final text of the report was still unavailable at the Brussels discussion site, and Le Monde reports overnight negotiation on the language had gone line by line2 among the government delegations. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said approval of the accord -- the IPCC's second of four reports on global warming -- "has been a complex exercise," while one frustrated participant told the Associated Press: "The authors lost." Several scientists objected to government delegates' editing of the final draft, and some said they would never take part in the process again, the AP reports. While the first IPCC chapter, released in February, concluded there is a 90% probability that the burning of fossil fuels and other activities contribute to global warming3, as Nature explains, today's report offers the most extensive international effort yet to define the effects. And that's where the IPCC scientists were clashing with governments, specifically China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the U.S.4, the Financial Times and other media reported.
Among the changes in language was removal of the phrase "strong evidence" in discussing how global warming would hurt biodiversity5, according to Dow Jones Newswires' Anne Jollis. Instead, the finished report says: "available evidence shows that global warming would have negative effects on biodiversity." The report does offer the first evidence that man-made climate change is having a discernable effect on plants and animals around the world, co-Chairman Martin Parry said, adding: "For the first time, we're no longer arm waving with models6; this is empirical data, we can actually measure it," as the BBC reports. The most vulnerable areas of the world, he said, are: "The arctic, where temperatures are rising fast and ice is melting; sub-Saharan Africa, where dry areas are forecast to get dryer; small islands, because of their inherent lack of capacity to adapt, and Asian mega-deltas, where billions of people will be at increased risk of flooding."
Increases of just one degree to two degrees Celsius can hurt the production of cereal crops at low latitudes, even as it helps such crops at higher-latitude regions like Scandinavia. "There is some evidence that cereal yields are already declining in semi-arid areas," Mr. Parry said. The IPCC finds that by the end of this century, the rising seas and spreading deserts caused by global warming could hurt the economic growth of all countries, with poorer nations suffering the worst, Dow Jones reports, citing delegates. Those figures may undermine the White House's current arguments on the regulation of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. Earlier this week, President Bush, in discussing a Supreme Court decision on the subject, asserted that any means of addressing global warming "cannot hurt economic growth7."
The report says areas of the world with rain shortages are likely to get drier, even as threats of flooding, severe storms and coastline erosion increase for coastal areas, the AP reports. A new study in Science shows a broad consensus among climate models that "anthropogenic climate change" will have serious implications for water resources across the American Southwest. "If these models are correct, the levels of aridity of the recent multiyear drought, or the Dust Bowl and 1950s droughts, will, within the coming years to decades8, become the new climatology" of the region, Science says. The Los Angeles Times notes that "the transformation may already be underway9. Much of the region has been in a severe drought since 2000, which the [Science] study's analysis of computer climate models shows as the beginning of a long dry period."
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