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  Yahoo News 1 Feb 07
Global temperature set to rise between 1.8 and 4 C by 2100: UN panel
by Marlowe Hood

Yahoo News 2 Feb 07
Global warming 'very likely' man-made
By SETH BORENSTEIN 3 minutes ago

PlanetArk 2 Feb 07
U.N. Panel Blames Humans for Warming
Story by Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

PlanetArk 2 Feb 07
Seas Rising Faster than U.N. Predicts - Study
Story by Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

National Geographic 1 Feb 07
Climate Change Predictions Not Exaggerated, Analysis Says
John Roach for National Geographic News

Tomorrow the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will release a major report with grim predictions for the coming decades, according to journalists who have seen draft versions of the paper.

If the IPCC's recent track record is any indication, the predictions will be no exaggeration, according to an analysis posted today on the Web site of the journal Science.

The Science study compared actual climate measurements with the predictions of computer models in a 2001 IPCC report. In recent years actual concentrations of carbon dioxide--a greenhouse gas linked to global warming--have followed almost exactly the projections of the 2001 IPCC report.

If anything, the IPCC may have underestimated some climate threats in 2001. For example, actual temperatures were at the high end of the predicted range. And sea levels have actually risen faster than the predicted.

"The real climate system is changing as fast or in some components even faster than expected by [the] IPCC," Stefan Rahmstorf, an ocean physicist at Potsdam University in Germany, said in an email.

Rahmstorf is the Science study's lead author. He is also among the scientists gathered in Paris to finalize the IPCC's 2007 assessment report for Friday.

Friday's report will be the fourth report compiled by the panel since the United Nations and World Meteorological Organization established the IPCC in 1988. Hundreds of scientists contribute to each study. Richard Alley is a glaciologist at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in the Science study but is an IPCC report author.

The study vindicating the 2001 report is "great and important," Alley said in an email from Paris. "There has long been a muttering, out in the blogosphere and other places, that the scientists have been exaggerating and trying to scare people so as to generate more research money," he said. "If you wish to accuse scientists of systematic error, Rahmstorf et al show that we have been a bit conservative, and clearly not alarmist," Alley added.

Grim Within Reason

According to Rahmstorf, the main message of the brief Science analysis posted today is to counter claims that the IPCC paints "unduly grim future scenarios."

"Unfortunately, this is not true," he continued. Media reports based on early drafts of the IPCC assessment due Friday indicate it will predict a transformed planet due to climate change.

Among the reported projections: more frequent damaging storms, disappearing mountain glaciers, acidic oceans, and destroyed coral reefs. The report is also expected to say these changes are mostly due, with a 90 percent certainty, to human-caused emission of greenhouse gases.

"I hope this report will shock people, governments into taking more serious action," Rejendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, told Reuters news agency last week.

IPCC to Be Too Conservative?

The Science study's Rahmstorf noted what may be the upcoming report's Achilles heal. The models to be summarized by the IPCC fail to incorporate the recent instability of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, which affects sea level.

"While the ice sheet contribution [to sea rising sea levels] has been small, observations are indicating that [the role of ice sheets in determining sea levels] is rapidly increasing," Rahmstorf and colleagues write in the Science article.

Penn State's Alley said the IPCC literature review process prevent the inclusion of these recent observations in the upcoming assessment report--the deadline has passed. "This does make the assessment slightly out of date when it comes out," Alley said.

But having a relatively early submission deadline "improves quality control and enhances the believability" by allowing hundreds of scientists time to pore over, he added.

Konrad Steffen, a professor of geography at the University of Colorado, studies how melting ice sheets and glaciers contribute to sea level rise. He said in an email that the exclusion of the latest ice observations will make the IPCC's sea level predictions "too conservative."

But Rahmstorf said he expects the IPCC report to acknowledge the "well-recognized uncertainty about future ice sheet behavior."

PlanetArk 2 Feb 07
Seas Rising Faster than U.N. Predicts - Study
Story by Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

PARIS - Sea levels are rising faster than predicted amid global warming, a group of scientists said on Thursday in a challenge to the U.N.'s climate panel which is set to issue a report toning down the threat of rising oceans.

The researchers -- from the United States, Germany, France, Australia and Britain -- wrote in the journal Science that seas have been edging up more rapidly since 1990 than at any time in more than a century, outpacing computer projections.

"The data now available raise concerns that the climate system, in particular sea level, may be responding more quickly than climate models indicate," Stefan Ramstorf of Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-authors wrote.

Still, they said it was too early to say for sure that the accelerated rise was linked to greenhouse gases from human burning of fossil fuels. It might, they said, be caused by some natural climate variation.

Rising seas, widely linked to a warming stoked by emissions of greenhouse gases, could swamp low-lying Pacific islands, large tracts of Bangladesh or the southern United States and threaten cities from Shanghai to Buenos Aires.

And governments want to plan how to confront a long-term threat that could cause billions of dollars in damage.

The scientists said the rises seemed to exceed projections made in 2001 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which said sea levels were likely to rise by between 9 cm and 88 cm (3.5-34.6 inches) by 2100. But the Science article comes on the eve of a new IPCC report, to be released in Paris, set to cut the likely range of rises to between 28 cm and 43 cm this century, based on six computer models.

HEAT

The IPCC says the range is narrower because of cuts in predictions of how quickly the oceans absorb heat -- water gets bigger as it warms. It also projects that Antarctica, by far the biggest store of frozen ice, will stay too cold to melt.

The experts writing in Science, including NASA's James Hansen, said sea levels rose by 3.3 mm (0.1299 inch) a year from 1993-2006, according to satellite measurements, against an IPCC best estimate in 2001 of below 2 mm a year. Sea levels rose 17 cm in the 20th century. The 1993-2006 rate, if it lasted a century, would work out at 33 centimetres but many models project a quickening pace because of a buildup of greenhouse gases.

"Previous projections, as summarised by the IPCC, have not exaggerated but may in some respects even have underestimated the change, in particular for sea level," the scientists wrote.

Rahmstorf declined give his best estimate of how far sea levels would rise -- he wrote a report in December saying that observations of past data indicated that seas could rise by 50-140 cms by 2100, far higher than IPCC projections.

PlanetArk 2 Feb 07
U.N. Panel Blames Humans for Warming
Story by Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

PARIS - The U.N. climate panel agreed in its starkest warning yet on Thursday that human activities are causing global warming that may bring more droughts, heatwaves and rising seas, delegates said.

The report, due for release on Friday and bolstering conclusions from a 2001 study, may put pressure on governments and companies to do more to curb greenhouse gases mainly from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars.

Scientists and government officials in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the most authoritative group on global warming, agreed it was "very likely" that human activities were the main cause of warming in the past 50 years, delegates said.

In IPCC language, "very likely" means at least 90 percent probability and is the strongest link to human activities since the IPCC was set up in 1988. The previous study in 2001 said a link was "likely", or 66 percent probable. IPCC officials declined comment, saying that the report would be issued on Friday at 0830 GMT.

"Nobody's challenging the scientific findings, just the wording," one delegate said, adding the talks might last until early Friday.

The Eiffel Tower, near the meeting hall, and some French homes shut off lights for five minutes on Thursday night in an action to highlight energy waste and global warming, briefly cutting France's power consumption by one percent.

The IPCC, grouping 2,500 scientists from 130 countries, is also set to say that oceans will keep rising for more than 1,000 years even if governments stabilise greenhouse gas emissions.

The report is the first of four this year by the panel that will outline threats of warming. Delegates said the Paris meeting, looking at the science of global warming, agreed a "best estimate" that temperatures will rise by 3 Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) by 2100 over pre-industrial levels, the biggest change in a century for thousands of years.

MORE RAIN, LESS ICE

It says bigger gains, of up to 6.3C in one model, cannot be ruled out but do not fit well with other data. The world is now about 5C warmer than during the last Ice Age.

The draft accord projects that Arctic ice will shrink, and perhaps disappear in summers by 2100, while heatwaves and downpours would get more frequent. The number of tropical hurricanes might decrease but the storms would become stronger.

The Gulf Stream bringing warm waters to the North Atlantic could slow, although a shutdown is highly unlikely, it says.

And sea levels are likely to rise by between 28 and 43 cm (11-17 inches) this century, a lower range than forecast in 2001. Rising seas threaten low-lying Pacific islands and low-lying coastal nations from Bangladesh to the Netherlands.

A group of scientists from the United States, Germany, France, Australia and Britain cautioned in the journal Science on Thursday that sea level rises in the past decade had outpaced previous IPCC forecasts.

"The data now available raise concerns that the climate system, in particular sea level, may be responding more quickly than climate models indicate," Stefan Ramstorf of Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-authors wrote.

Many experts hope the IPCC report will spur stalled talks on expanding the fight against global warming.

Thirty-five industrial nations aim to cut emissions of greenhouse gases to 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12 under the U.N. Kyoto Protocol and want outsiders such as the United States, China and India to do more.

Last week President George W. Bush said climate change was a "serious challenge". But he has stopped short of capping emissions despite pressure from Democrats who control both houses of Congress -- arguing Kyoto would damage the economy.


Yahoo News 2 Feb 07
Global warming 'very likely' man-made
By SETH BORENSTEIN 3 minutes ago

PARIS - The world's leading climate scientists, in their most powerful language ever used on the issue, said global warming is "very likely" man-made, according to a new report obtained Friday by The Associated Press.

The report provides what may be cold comfort in slightly reduced projections on rising temperatures and sea levels by the year 2100. But it is tempered by a flat pronouncement that global warming is essentially a runaway train that cannot be stopped for centuries.

"The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice-mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing, and very likely that is not due to known natural causes alone," said the 20-page report.

Human-caused warming and rises in sea-level "would continue for centuries" because the process has already started, "even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilized," said the 20-page report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The report by a group of hundreds of scientists and representatives of 113 governments contains the most authoritative science on the issue. It was due for official release later Friday morning in Paris.

The phrase "very likely" translates to a more than 90 percent certainty that global warming is caused by man. What that means in layman's language is "we have this nailed," said top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who originated the percentage system.

It marked an escalation from the panel's last report in 2001, which said warming was "likely" caused by human activity. There had been speculation that the participants might try to up the ante to "virtually certain" man causes global warming, which translates to 99 percent chance.

On sea levels, the report projects rises of 7-23 inches by the end of the century. That could be augmented by an additional 4-8 inches if recent surprising polar ice sheet melt continues. The 2001 report projected a sea level rise of up to 35 inches.

Many scientists had warned that this was being too cautious and said sea level rise could be closer to 3 to 5 feet because of ice sheet melt.

But despite losing on that battle, scientists said the report is strong. "There's no question that the powerful language is intimately linked to the more powerful science," said one of the study's many co-authors, Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria, who spoke by phone from Canada.

He said the report was based on science that is rock-solid, peer-reviewed, conservative and consensus "It's very conservative. Scientists by their nature are skeptics."

The scientists wrote the report, based on years of peer-reviewed research; government officials edited it with an eye toward the required unanimous approval by world governments. In the end, there was little debate on the strength of the wording about human activity most likely to blame.

"That is a big move. I hope it is a powerful statement," said Jan Pretel, head of the department of climate change at the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute.

The panel quickly agreed Thursday on two of the most contentious issues: attributing global warming to man-made burning of fossil fuels and connecting it to a recent increase in stronger hurricanes.

Negotiations over a final third difficult issue--how much sea level rise is predicted by 2100 ? went into the night Thursday with a deadline approaching for the report.

While critics call the panel overly alarmist, it is by nature relatively cautious because it relies on hundreds of scientists, including skeptics. "I hope that policymakers will be quite convinced by this message," said Riibeta Abeta, a delegate whose island nation Kiribati is threatened by rising seas. "The purpose is to get them moving."

The Chinese delegation was resistant to strong wording on global warming, said Barbados delegate Leonard Fields and others. China has increasingly turned to fossil fuels for its huge and growing energy needs and it asked that an ambiguous footnote be added to the "very likely" statement.

The footnote reads: "Consideration of remaining uncertainty is based on current methodology," according to an official who was at the negotiations but was sworn to secrecy.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government delegation was not one of the more vocal groups in the debate over whether warming is man-made, said other countries' officials. And several attendees credited the head of the panel session, Susan Solomon, a top U.S. government climate scientist, with pushing through the agreement so quickly.

The Bush administration acknowledges that global warming is man-made and a problem that must be dealt with, Bush science adviser John Marburger has said. However, Bush continues to reject mandatory limits on so-called "greenhouse" gases, even as he acknowledges the existence of climate change.

But this is more than just a U.S. issue. "What you're trying to do is get the whole planet under the proverbial tent in how to deal with this, not just the rich countries," Mahlman said Thursday. "I think we're in a different kind of game now."

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

The reports are released in phases, with this one being the first of four this year. The next report is due in April and will discuss the effects of global warming. But there are some elements of that in the current document.

The report says that global warming has made stronger hurricanes, including those on the Atlantic Ocean, such as Hurricane Katrina, according to Fields, the Barbados delegate, and others. It also said an increase in hurricane and tropical cyclone strength since 1970 "more likely than not" can be attributed to man-made global warming.

The scientists said global warming's connection varies with storms in different parts of the world, but that the storms that strike the Americas are global warming-influenced. That's a contrast from the 2001 which said there was not enough evidence to make such a conclusion.

And it conflicts with a November 2006 statement by the World Meteorological Organization, which helped found the IPCC. The meteorological group said it could not link past stronger storms to global warming.

Fields--of Barbados, a country in the path of many hurricanes--said the new wording was "very important." He noted that insurance companies--which look to science to calculate storm risk--"watch the language, too."


Yahoo News 1 Feb 07
Global temperature set to rise between 1.8 and 4 C by 2100: UN panel
by Marlowe Hood

PARIS (AFP) - The earth's surface temperature will probably rise by between 1.8 and 4.0 C (3.24 and 7.24 F) by the turn of the century, according to a "best estimate" agreed by the UN's top scientific panel for global warming, sources said.

The estimate was released as the world's top climate experts struggled against the clock to hammer out a consensus report on global warming that is already radiating political shockwaves.

The 1.8-4.0 C warming is experts' "best estimate" in forecasts for 2090-2099 compared to 1980-1999, depending on how much carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, enters the atmosphere by 2100.

In 2001, using a somewhat different method of calculation, the IPCC gave a temperature range of between 1.4 and 5.8 C (2.52-10.4 F).

The consensus estimate will feature in a major update about global warming due to be unveiled in Paris on Friday by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) after a four-day debate.

The first review of the evidence since 2001, it summarises the work of thousands of climate scientists, working in fields as diverse as ice cores, coral reefs, ocean current observation and atmospheric monitoring.

Greenhouse gases are carbon gases that trap the sun's heat instead of letting it radiate into space. They exist naturally, but the IPCC report is expected to declare that man-made gases -- especially carbon pollution from fossil fuels -- are almost certainly to blame for most of the warming observed in the last half-century.

This warming is already affecting the climate, causing shrinking snow and ice cover, retreating permafrost, longer droughts and changed precipitation patterns.

More than 500 scientists huddled at the closed-door meeting in Paris, poring over the first review of the scientific evidence for global warming in six years. "None of the 'usual suspects' -- the United States, the oil-producing countries and China -- have attempted to obstruct the discussions" or "corrupt the science in the report," said a participant.

But the line-by-line vetting was slowed by the sheer task of making the document intelligible for policymakers without sacrificing scientific accuracy.

There was also sharp debate, sources said, about what should be included, or not, in the phonebook-sized report's all-important summary.

"The two main sticking points have been how to describe the temperature projections and the rise in sea levels," said the environmental scientist.

A forecast in the draft that sea levels will rise by 28 to 43 centimeters (11.2 to 17.2 inches) has also been contested as too conservative by some scientists, both sources said, as it does not factor in recently-observed melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica.

"The paleontologists point out that during the last intergalacial period, sea levels rose at one meter (3.25 feet) or higher per century," a source said.

As the week-long meeting got underway, global warming initiatives announced around the world underscored the extent to which climate change is fast becoming a top priority for policy makers.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) joined with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) -- the offshoot of the 1992 Rio Summit -- to call on new Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to call a special summit on global warming.

US lawmakers called Tuesday for an end to American complacency over global warming as the new Democratic-controlled Congress weighed measures to reduce greenhouse gases.

Two more volumes of the IPCC assessment are due out in April and early May. They will assess the environmental and social impacts of these changes and ways of mitigating climate shift.

The Eiffel Tower, near the conference venue, as well as the Colosseum in Rome and other landmarks throughout Europe, extinguished their lights for five minutes at 7:55 pm (1855 GMT) as part of a campaign to raise awareness about energy efficiency and fossil-fuel pollution.
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