No doubt about global warming, U.N. scientists say
VALENCIA, Spain - Global warming is “unequivocal” and carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere commits the world to an average rise in sea levels of up to 4.6 feet, the world’s top climate experts warned Saturday in their most authoritative report to date.
“Only urgent, global action will do,” said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, calling on the United States and China - the world’s two biggest polluters - to do more to slow global climate change.
Ban, however, advised against assigning blame.
Climate change imperils “the most precious treasures of our planet,” he said, and the effects are “so severe and so sweeping that only urgent global action will do. We are all in this together. We must work together.”
According to the U.N. panel of scientists, whose latest report is a synthesis of three previous ones, enough carbon dioxide already has built up that it imperils islands, coastlines and a fifth to two-thirds of the world’s species.
As early as 2020, 75 million to 250 million people in Africa will suffer water shortages and residents of Asia’s large cities will be at great risk of river and coastal flooding, according to the report.
Europeans can expect extensive species loss, and North Americans will experience longer and hotter heat waves and greater competition for water, says the report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the Nobel Prize with Al Gore this year.
The panel portrays the Earth hurtling toward a warmer climate at a quickening pace and warns of inevitable human suffering. It says emissions of carbon, mainly from fossil fuels, must stabilize by 2015 and go down after that.
In the best-case scenario, temperatures will keep rising from carbon already in the atmosphere, the report said. Even if factories were shut down today and cars taken off the roads, the average sea level will reach as high as 4.6 feet above that in the preindustrial period, or about 1850.
Climate change is here, they said, as witnessed by melting snow and glaciers, higher average temperatures and rising sea levels. If unchecked, global warming will spread hunger and disease, put further stress on water resources, cause fiercer storms and more frequent droughts, and could drive up to 70 percent of plant and animal species to extinction, according to the panel’s report.
“The world’s scientists have spoken clearly and with one voice,” Ban said, looking ahead to an important climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, next month. “I expect the world’s policymakers to do the same.”
The report is intended to both set the stage and serve as a guide for the conference, at which world leaders will begin discussing a global climate-change treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
The United States opted out of Kyoto in 2001, arguing that the science was unproven and that the burden of mandatory emission cuts was unfair since it excluded fast-growing China and India.
Seattle is one of many U.S. cities that have made efforts to meet the targets of the Kyoto treaty.
Chief U.S. delegate Sharon Hays said doubts about the science of Kyoto have been dispelled.
“What’s changed since 2001 is the scientific certainty that this is happening,” she said in a conference call late Friday.
She did not indicate that Washington would abandon its policy of voluntary emission cuts.
Material from Seattle Times archives is included in this report.