| Sports |
by ANNE CHAON
and RICHARD INGHAM
UN climate report to have global repercussions
PARIS: A political timebomb is set to
detonate next week, and the men and women priming the device
prefer to wear sensible brown shoes or ties that look like socks –
and they rarely raise their voices above a reasoned murmur.
They are members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), the UN’s paramount scientific authority on the causes and
effects of global warming.
In the alphabetti spaghetti of acronyms, the IPCC hardly stands
out in the public mind. It stays quietly in the background,
publishing its big work, an updated report on climate change, only
every half-dozen years or so.
But its anonymity is inversely proportionate to its clout.
Indirectly, the IPCC gave birth to the 1992 Rio summit and the
treaties that followed it, including the Kyoto Protocol on curbing
greenhouse gases, and the world carbon markets.
What it says next week is likewise destined to ripple across the
spectrum of human life.
It will hike pressure on leaders everywhere – led by president
George W. Bush, whose country is the No. 1 carbon polluter – to
put action on climate change at the top of their agendas.
“Time is running out,” Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said in Paris
earlier this month.
“The IPCC report will increase the sense of urgency. But that
still leaves you with the question of how to convey that urgency.”
On Feb 2, the IPCC will issue the first chapter of the fourth
assessment report – a phone-book-sized volume on the scientific
basis for climate change.
In a plain, neutral, objective text, this report is likely to say:
l Global warming, mainly caused by unbridled burning of fossil
fuels, is accelerating;
l Climate change, which had been widely expected to start decades
from now, is already on the march, discernible through shrinking
glaciers, the thinning Arctic icecap and retreating permafrost;
l An early consequence for humanity will be changed rainfall
patterns, leading to heightened water stress, prolonged droughts
and floods;
l If temperatures rise too much, this will add more greenhouse
gas, currently stored in the ground, into the atmosphere, thus
accelerating the warming; and,
lAmong other potential threats, depending on the future pollution
level, are higher sea levels and more frequent violent storms.
“We are now on a timescale whereby, when we talk about ‘future
generations’, they are already there – they are the children who
are in primary school or kindergarten today,” French climatologist
Jean Jouzel, a member of the IPCC, said.
In its first report in 1990, the IPCC said there was evidence that
concentrations of man-made greenhouse gases were increasing in the
atmosphere and these would warm the planet’s surface by trapping
solar radiation.
That led to the creation of the UNFCCC at the 1992 Rio Summit,
followed in 1997 by the Kyoto Protocol, the first-ever agreement
aimed at curbing carbon pollution.
Its third and last report, in 2001, delivered the most emphatic
warning yet, saying human activities caused most of the warming of
the previous 50 years.
By 2100, the global atmospheric temperature will have risen
between 1.8 and 5.6 C (3.25-10.08 F) and sea levels by 0.09 to
0.88 metres (3.5-35 inches), according to the pollution level
factored into its computer scenario in 2001.
In one of his first acts in office, Bush abandoned the Kyoto
Protocol, defending this decision in part by saying he doubted
there was a scientific consensus about global warming.
Bush commissioned his own report from US scientists – who then
agreed with the IPCC’s assessment almost to the letter.
Over the past six years, hundreds of studies, published in
peer-reviewed scientific journals, have published a mountain of
evidence about man-made global warming and its effects.
As a result, “climate skeptics” have shrunk to a tiny minority
among scientists but they remain vocal, well-funded and
influential in Washington.
Even so, many states in Bush’s America are taking their own action
on greenhouse gases and the once-solid corporate front that
opposed a mandatory approach has fractured, with some of the
country’s biggest companies clamouring for federal regulation. –
AFP
 
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