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  Yahoo News 29 Jan 07
World scientists meet on global warming
By Angela Charlton, Associated Press

PlanetArk 31 Jan 07
Millions to go Hungry, Waterless - Climate Report
Story by Rob Taylor

Yahoo News 30 Jan 07
Climate change means hunger and thirst for billions: report

SYDNEY (AFP) - Billions of people will suffer water shortages and the number of hungry will grow by hundreds of millions by 2080 as global temperatures rise, scientists warn in a new report.

The report estimates that between 1.1 billion and 3.2 billion people will be suffering from water scarcity problems by 2080 and between 200 million and 600 million more people will be going hungry.

The assessment is contained in a draft of a major international report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be released later this year, Australia's The Age newspaper said.

Rising sea levels could flood seven million more homes, while Australia's famed Great Barrier Reef, treasured as the world's largest living organism, could be dead within decades, the scientists warn, the newspaper said.

The Age said it had obtained a copy of the report, believed to be one of three prepared for release by the IPCC, which is highly regarded for its neutrality and caution.

Some 500 experts are meeting in Paris this week ahead of the release on Friday of the IPCC's first report since 2001 on the state of scientific knowledge on global warming. The report will be followed in April by volumes focusing on the impacts of climate change and on the social-economic costs of reducing the emission of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

A chapter on Australia in the report on global impacts warns that coral bleaching in the Barrier Reef is likely to become an annual occurrence by as early as 2030 due to warmer, more acidic seas. Bleaching occurs when the plant-like organisms that make up coral die and leave behind the white limestone skeleton of the reef.

The World Heritage site, stretching over more than 345,000 square kilometers (133,000 sq miles) off Australia's northeast coast, will become "functionally extinct", the scientists are quoted as saying.

Average global temperatures have already risen about 0.7 to 0.8 degrees since 1900, which the report says contributed to increased bleaching in coral reefs in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean.

At 2.0 to 3.0 degrees above 1900 levels, the report predicts the "complete loss" of Australia's alpine zones and the possible collapse of South America's Amazon forest system, causing a "huge loss of biodiversity".

The human and economic costs of climate change are likely to be highest in poor countries, with water shortages crippling many African nations and increased coastal flooding hitting low-lying countries such as Bangladesh and many Pacific islands, the report says.

PlanetArk 31 Jan 07
Millions to go Hungry, Waterless - Climate Report
Story by Rob Taylor

AUSTRALIA: January 31, 2007 CANBERRA - Rising temperatures will leave millions more people hungry by 2080 and cause critical water shortages in China and Australia, as well as parts of Europe and the United States, according to a new global climate report.

By the end of the century, climate change will bring water scarcity to between 1.1 and 3.2 billion people as temperatures rise by 2 to 3 Celsius (3.6 to 4.8 Fahrenheit), a leaked draft of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report said.

The report, due for release in April but detailed in The Age newspaper, said an additional 200 million to 600 million people across the world would face food shortages in another 70 years, while coastal flooding would hit another 7 million homes.

"The message is that every region of the earth will have exposure," Dr Graeme Pearman, who helped draft the report, told Reuters on Tuesday. "If you look at China, like Australia they will lose significant rainfall in their agricultural areas," said Pearman, the former climate director of Australia's top science body, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.

Africa and poor countries such as Bangladesh would be most affected because they were least able to cope with greater coastal damage and drought, said Pearman.

The IPCC was set up in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation and the UN Environment Programme to guide policy makers globally on the impact of climate change.

The panel is to release a report on Friday in Paris forecasting global temperatures rising by 2 to 4.5 Celsius (3.6 to 8.1 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels by 2100, with a "best estimate" of a 3C (5.4 F) rise.

That report will summarise the scientific basis of climate change, while the April draft details the consequences of global warming and options for adapting to them.

The draft contains an entire chapter on Australia -- which is in the grip of its worst recorded drought -- warning the country's Great Barrier Reef would become "functionally extinct" because of coral bleaching.

As well, snow would disappear from Australia's southeast alps, while water inflows to the Murray-Darling river basin, the country's main agricultural region, would fall by 10 and 25 percent by 2050.

In Europe, glaciers would disappear from the central Alps, while some Pacific island nations would be hit hard by rising sea levels and more frequent tropical storms.

"It's really a story of trying to assess in your own region what your exposure will be, and making sure you have ways to deal with it," said Pearman.

On the positive side, Pearman said there was an enormous amount the international community could do to avert climate change if swift action was taken. "The projections in the report that comes out this week are based on the assumption that we are slow to respond and that things continue more-or-less as they have in the past."

Some scientists say Australia -- the world's driest inhabited continent -- is suffering from "accelerated climate change" compared to other nations.

Yahoo News 29 Jan 07
World scientists meet on global warming
By Angela Charlton, Associated Press

PARIS - The planet's temperature is rising, sea levels threaten to swallow coastlines and the world's residents want to know how much to be afraid. An authoritative answer comes this week.

Some 500 scientists and officials convened in Paris on Monday for a week of word-by-word editing of a long-awaited report on how fast the world is warming, how serious it is- and how much is the fault of humans.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to be released Friday, could influence what governments and businesses do to fight global warming. It will be watched closely in the U.S., whose government stands accused by many around the world of playing down the peril.

Scientists are keeping quiet about the report's contents, but say it is both more specific and more sweeping than previous efforts to chart hotter summers, snowless ski seasons and breakaway ice sheets and what they mean for the Earth's future.

"At no time in the past has there been a greater global appetite" for reliable information on global warming, the panel's chairman, climatologist Rajendra Pachauri of India, told the conference.

The report is expected to warn of continued temperature rises through the century and reiterate that people-created pollution is partly to blame. But debate may arise at the closed-door meetings over how much sea levels are rising.

Early drafts of the paper foresaw smaller sea level rises than the last report, in 2001. But many top scientists reject the new figures, saying they are not new enough: They do not include the recent melt-off of big ice sheets in two crucial locations--Greenland and Antarctica. Many fear this melt-off will mean the world's coasts will be swamped much earlier than previously thought.

Others believe the ice melt is temporary and won't play such a dramatic role. In the past, the panel did not expect a large melt of ice in west Antarctica and Greenland this century. Their forecasts were based only on how much the sea level would rise because of melting glaciers, which are different from ice sheets, and the physical expansion of water as it warms.

During the meetings, science and politics will converge as climate experts work with diplomats to finalize the wording of the panel's report, the first of four major documents on global warming it is scheduled to release this year.

This week's meetings are not addressing how to tackle global warming. That will be the subject of one of the panel's other reports later this year. "We're hoping that it will convince people that climate change is real and that we have a responsibility for much of it, and that we really do have to make changes in how we live," said Kenneth Denman, one of the report's authors.

The panel, created by the United Nations in 1988, releases its assessments every five to six years--although scientists have been observing climate warming since as far back as the 1960s.

While critics call the panel overly alarmist, it is by nature cautious because it relies on input from hundreds of scientists, including skeptics and industry researchers. And its reports must be unanimous, approved by 154 governments--including the United States and oil-rich countries such as Saudi Arabia.

Pachauri said the report would make "significant advances" over the 2001 report, addressing gaps in that document, reducing uncertainties and adding new knowledge about past changes in climate.

As the panel meets, awareness of the consequences of climate change is growing. Last week, President Bush referred to global warming as an established fact, after years of arguing that not enough was known about its causes to do anything about it.

Indonesia's environment minister warned Monday that rising sea levels could inundate some 2,000 of his country's more than 18,000 islands by 2030. And new data released Monday by the U.N. Environment Program said 30 reference glaciers lost about 2.2 feet in thickness on average in 2005, for a total loss of 34.6 feet on average since 1980.

Activists want to ensure that consumers and governments don't sit and wait for the world to get warmer. Just a few hundred yards from the conference at UNESCO headquarters, Greenpeace activists strung a banner across the Eiffel Tower to urge swifter action against global warming, reading "It's Not Too Late."
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