Monday January 22 12:18 PM ET U.N. Report Warns of Global Warming

By JOE McDONALD, Associated Press Writer

SHANGHAI, China (AP) - Global temperatures could rise by as much as 101/2 degrees over the next century, triggering droughts, floods and other disasters from shifts in weather patterns, a U.N. report said Monday.

The projected rise in average worldwide temperatures is sharply higher than the 21/2-51/2 degrees previously thought, said Robert T. Watson, chairman of the U.N.-affiliated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which organized the meeting in Shanghai.

The U.N. report, by scientists from 99 countries, said new evidence shows more clearly than ever that rising temperatures are the fault of industrial pollution, not changes in the sun or from other natural causes.

Yet, few countries are meeting commitments to cut emissions of greenhouse gases, scientists said.

``Only a few countries such as Britain and Germany are on track to meet their targets,'' said Watson, an American who is chief science adviser to the World Bank. ``The United States is way off meeting its targets.''

The report is intended to add urgency to world climate negotiations that ended in November when countries couldn't agree on how to reduce greenhouse gases under a commitment by industrialized countries in 1997.

It is the most authoritative evidence yet to support warnings that air pollution threatens to wreak environmental havoc by causing the atmosphere to retain more of the sun's heat.

The United States is the biggest of producer of greenhouse gases, accounting for a quarter of the world total. China is No. 2, but has recently begun a far-reaching effort to shift coal-fired factories and power plants to natural gas and cleaner fuels.

The atmospheric level of carbon dioxide - the most common greenhouse gas - will be higher in the next century than it has been for 420,000 years, Sir John T. Houghton, co-chairman of the Shanghai meeting, told reporters.

``The rate of climate change this century is expected to be greater than it has been in the past 10,000 years,'' said Houghton, former director of Britain's weather agency.

New climate talks are to begin in May in Germany.

A key sticking point is the U.S.-led effort to reduce the cost of emissions cuts. Washington and its allies want to subtract carbon dioxide absorbed by forests and farmland from a country's reduction quota - a stance that some European governments oppose.

Negotiations also could be complicated by the new administration of President Bush, a former oil man who has expressed reluctance about U.S. commitments to curb greenhouse gases.

The Shanghai conference was the start of a series of meetings under U.N. auspices to gather evidence for climate negotiators. Other gatherings will focus on the social and economic costs of global warming and how to reduce it. The series ends in April with the release of a climate report in Nairobi, Kenya.

The scientists warned that rising temperatures threaten to disrupt fishing, farming and forestry, and kill much of the globe's coral reefs. Rising seas could flood heavily populated coastal areas of China, Bangladesh or Egypt.

The most extreme projections say melting Antarctic ice could raise sea levels by up to 10 feet over the next 1,000 years.

China is already feeling the impact of changing weather, said Ding Yihui, the meeting's other co-chairman and former director of the China National Climate Center. He said global warming may to be blame for a record drought that cut China's grain harvest by 10 percent.

``The poor in developing countries will be the most affected,'' Watson said.

Most growth in greenhouse gas emissions is expected to take place in developing countries, which aren't covered by the 1997 reduction agreement. Scientists said curbing that pollution will depend on encouraging the spread of pollution-control technology owned by richer countries.

``It's very unfair to say developing countries are not doing their part,'' Watson said.

``A country like China has done more, in my opinion, than a country like the United States to move forward in economic development while remaining environmentally sensitive.''

Global WARMING Could Be Worst In **10,000** Years

-- Ain't Gonna Happen (Not Here Not@ever.com), January 23, 2001

Answers

The Link to the story here

Warming could be worst in 10,000 years

Special report: global warming and Kyoto protocol in full

Tim Radford and Paul Brown Tuesday January 23, 2001

An international group of scientists has confirmed the worst fears of environmentalists: the Earth's atmosphere could soar by almost 6C by 2100 - a rise unprecedented in the past 10,000 years. The UN group reported yesterday in Shanghai that, in the worst case, the average temperature could rise by 5.8C this century, 2C higher than their original predictions. Sea levels could rise by 88cm (34.5in) by 2100, making tens of millions of people homeless in China's Pearl river delta, Bangladesh, the Nile delta of Egypt, and other low-lying regions.

"We see changes in climate, we believe we humans are involved and we're projecting future climate changes much more significant over the next 100 years than the last 100 years," said Robert Watson, introducing the latest, 1,000-page report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change.

Klaus Topfer, head of the UN environment programme, said the report "should ring alarm bells in every national capital and every local community".

The 1990s was the warmest decade for 1,000 years, said the report. Temperatures rose by an average of 0.6C during the last century, with an increase in floods and droughts. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen by 31% since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and scientists blame the reckless burning of fossil fuels. In one of the ironies of global politics, the scientists issued their report on the day that George Bush - who has said he is not convinced climate change is really happening - took office as the new US president.

But much of the science behind the IPCC report comes from the highest tiers of US and European research. The warnings may kickstart a political process that has been stalled since November. Developed nations met at the Hague to agree to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 5.5% by 2010 - well short of the 60% cut scientists say is needed - but the talks collapsed, largely because of US attitudes.

The researchers present the "worst case" picture, as well as projections of possi ble temperature rises if nations cooperate. But the outlook is grim. The area of northern polar sea ice has shrunk by up to 15% in the past 40 years, and the thickness of the ice has fallen by 40%. Satellite studies have shown that snow cover has shrunk by 10% in the past 30 years.

Environmentalists described the report as "terrifying". Sir John Houghton, a former Meteorological Office chief and an IPCC member, said: "The 6C depends on just how much fossil fuel we burn this next century - if we burn less, then the increase will be less. But what it means for the world is that the sea level will rise."

-- Uncle Bob (unclb0b@aol.com), January 23, 2001.

Comment from Still waiting for Greenhouse.

`Worse Than Previously Thought' - Again (23 Jan 2001)

The UN’s panel on climate change (IPCC) have released the final version of the `Third Assessment Report' (TAR) of the IPCC scientific group at a U.N. climate conference in Shanghai, China. It was touted as a `new' report, but a draft of it was leaked to the US media last November, just hours before Al Gore's policy speech on climate.

The report has lived down to expectations, containing the same hysterical claims, the same lack of sound science that we have come to expect from the UN body, coupled with the same tired old cliches about things being `much worse than previously thought’.

In particular, they claim that the environmentally desirable removal of sulfates from fossil fuel use will remove an existing cooling brake on climate, thus provoking even stronger warming. This theory, an article of faith with the IPCC, is nothing but junk science as the only part of the globe to have warmed in recent decades is the one third above latitude 20°N, the very part which has the highest concentration of these sulfates. The other two-thirds of the planet which is largely sulfate-free has not warmed at all. According to the sulfate theory, the situation should have been reversed - a warmer southern two-thirds, a cooler one third.

Things are indeed much worse than previously thought - not for global climate, but for the Greenhouse industry and its UN sponsors, whose agenda is more to do with wealth transfer than with climate. Their claims are being greeted with increasing skepticism by both the public, the media, and even governments. Their best chance to bludgeon the world into embracing their austere future vision, the Hague Conference in November, collapsed in disarray. Since then, the world has seen a vicious northern winter in many regions across the northern hemisphere, including the USA, casting further doubt on the soundness of what passes for `science’ in the alice-in-wonderland world of the greenhouse industry. The final blow came with the departure from the political scene of greenhouse promoter Al Gore and the rise to the US presidency of George Bush, who has expressed a more cautious view on global warming.

Why should anyone take this latest UN report seriously?

It’s hard to believe in `global warming’ when one is shovelling snow from one’s backyard in the coldest winter in decades in the USA. It’s hard to believe in global warming when the only real scientific measure of global temperature - the 22-year satellite record - shows no warming at all over two-thirds of the globe and only slight warming over the remaining one third. It’s hard to believe in global warming when the scientists who study it act more like wild-eyed zealots than sober scientists. It’s hard to believe in global warming when one rural weather station after another shows a long history of nothing much at all. It’s hard to believe in global warming when rising sea levels always seem to be reported for somewhere else far away, but never in one’s own backyard. It’s hard to believe in global warming when an entire reputable science, solar science, says the sun has been getting hotter during the 20th century and therefore must have warmed the planet during that time anyway.

The IPCC has responded to their crisis of relevance by upping the ante yet again. Bigger warming `than previously thought’, higher sea levels `than previously thought’, more disasters `than previously thought’. And all on the basis of a report whose evidence is so thin and fraught with contradictions that skeptics can demolish it with ease - when the media affords them the opportunity and space to do so. 

"At present, there is no statistical reason to associate the recent warming with atmospheric CO2 increases" - not the words of a climate skeptic in a state of denial. Rather they are the words of greenhouse luminaries, Tom Wigley of NCAR and Phil Jones of CRU, in a paper they jointly published in `Monthly Weather Review’ in 1982. The historical temperature data they were using at that time has not changed, only their spin on it has changed. That’s what politicians do, not scientists. The IPCC is similarly driven by politics, not science.

The panel spokesman Robert Watson said to the BBC - "There's no doubt the Earth's climate is changing. The decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the last century and the warming in this century is warmer than anything in the last 1,000 years in the Northern Hemisphere."

That the Earth's climate is changing is hardly groundbreaking news. It always has been changing, is doing so now, and always will do so. Hi-jacking natural climate change as being entirely the fault of humanity is just political grandstanding. The 1990s were no hotter than the 1930s, a fact clearly evident in the cleaner rural weather station records from around the world [see evidence here]. As for the last 1,000 years, the Medieval Warm Period around 1200 AD was much warmer than today, proved by numerous international scientific studies (which were free of of IPCC censorship) [see evidence here]. His last claim was based on only one seriously flawed study, dismissing the hundreds of other studies which proved quite the opposite.

Upping the ante in this way is the last desperate act of a bankrupt industry. The industry is thus poised for a dramatic fall from grace. The tragedy is that other, more reputable, sciences may suffer in the backwash.

-- Malcolm Taylor (taylorm@es.co.nz), January 24, 2001.