Posted on 11/17/2007 6:31:13 PM PST by NormsRevenge
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.
"I look forward to seeing the U.S. and China playing a more constructive role," Ban told reporters. "Both countries can lead in their own way."
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, 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.
"We have already committed the world to sea level rise," the panel's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, said. But if the Greenland ice sheet melts, the scientists said, they could not predict by how many feet the seas will rise, drowning coastal cities.
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 report was adopted after five days of sometimes tense negotiations among 140 national delegations. It lays out blueprints for avoiding the worst catastrophes — and various possible outcomes, depending on how quickly and decisively action is taken.
"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 policy makers 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.
That treaty, which expires in 2012, required industrial nations to reduce greenhouse gases and a smooth transition to a new treaty is needed to avoid upsetting the fledgling carbon markets.
"This report will have an incredible political impact," Yvo de Boer, the U.N.'s top climate change official, told The Associated Press. "It's a signal that politicians cannot afford to ignore."
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.
Chief U.S. delegate Sharon Hays said doubts 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.
China and India have said any measures impinging on their development and efforts to lift their people from poverty were unacceptable — a point likely to be heeded at the Bali talks.
The report offered dozens of measures for avoiding the worst catastrophes if taken together — at a cost of less than 0.12 percent of the global economy annually until 2050. They ranged from switching to nuclear and gas-fired power stations, developing hybrid cars, using more efficient electrical appliances and managing cropland to store more carbon.
Ban said a new agreement should provide funding to help poor countries develop clean energy resources, adapt to climate conditions and give them the technology to help themselves.
He said he witnessed the devastation of climate change in disappearing glaciers of Antarctica, the deforested Amazon and under the ozone hole in Chile.
"These scenes are as frightening as a science fiction movie," said Ban. "But they are even more terrifying because they are real."
In this photo supplied by Greenpeace, Greenpeace activists on a rubber boat buzz the 'Front Driver', cargo ship, some 15 miles off the coast of Valencia on the closing day of the 27th Plenary of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Valencia, Saturday Nov. 17, 2007. Greenpeace claims the ship is carrying 153,000 tonnes of coal destined for the Spanish port of Tarragona. Greenpeace banner reads 'burning coal destroys the climate'. (AP Photo/Greenpeace, Pedro Armestre)
It’s China’s fault.
I wonder if we paid off all the GW hucksters. if they would just rein it in a bit? Man, have some folks gone bonkers of late.
Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) gestures at a "Presidential Forum on Global Warming and America's Energy Future," in Los Angeles November 17, 2007. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson (UNITED STATES)
I think the pimple is aboot to pop,they can’t keep this up forever withoot sayin “dudes,we are so liars....what else we got on the agenda instead?”
Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) gestures at a "Presidential Forum on Global Warming and America's Energy Future," in Los Angeles November 17, 2007. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson (UNITED STATES)
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Modern day con men , the whole damn lot of them and their bought off politcos.
Democratic presidential candidate, former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., participate in a 'Presidential Forum on
Global Warming and America's Energy Future,' in Los Angeles Saturday, Nov. 17, 2007. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon)
Future historians will refer to this time as “The EcoInsaniPillagous Era”
I swear....2007 will go down as GLOBAL WARMING YEAR.....I’m hoping they’ll burn out by Dec. 31st.....
The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. -- Paul Ehrlich - The Population Bomb (1968)
In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish. -- Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)
This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000. -- Lowell Ponte "The Cooling", 1976
"There is very important climatic change (Global Cooling) going on right now, and it’s not merely something of academic interest. It is something that, if it continues, will affect the whole human occupation of the earth – like a billion people starving. The effects are already showing up in a rather drastic way.” - American Institute of Physics February 1974
"Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind. We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation," - Barry Commoner Washington University Earth Day 1970
NOAA announced its predictions for the 2006 hurricane season, saying it expects an "above normal" year with 13-16 named storms. Of these storms, the agency says it expects four to be hurricanes of category 3 or above, double the yearly average of prior seasons in recorded history. With experts calling the coming hurricane season potentially worse than last year's, oil prices have jumped 70 cents per barrel in New York and made similar leaps elsewhere. Economists anticipate that demand for oil will rise sharply over the summer, when as many as four major hurricanes could hit the United States. -- Seed Magazine 5/19/06
But this time they are surely correct? Yeah, sure
Ever since man 1st walked out onto the Savannah there has been people preaching of the coming doomsday and promising salvation from the whatever coming apocalypse if you would only just turn more control and more money over to them, and every single time without exception they've been wrong. The modern day global warming movement is no different.
vaudine
I can not believe how much advertising is pumping the grand scheme of our time... some folks have gone over the edge.. it is baffling that supposedly intelligent well educated folks can be so gullible.. unless they’re in on it for the booty.. ;-)
make that loot, not booty.. ;-)
this era certainly rivals the days of “FRee sex” and its movement.. and there I was, underage.. like that matters these days.. unfortunately
Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) speaks at a "Presidential Forum on Global Warming and America's Energy Future," in Los Angeles November 17, 2007. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson (UNITED STATES)
This means we are off the hook! The RATs are telling us that there are two Americas; the poor and the rich. So we have to take care of the ones in poverty first, and we need some more technological development, too. Until then the UN (Useless Nations) can BS some more with AlGore about the men made climate change.
I just posted the below thread. I urge all who want a dose of reality read it and view the linked videos.
Scary picture. I can just see her mouthing the words: "We are going to take things from you for the common good."
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Rajendra Pachauri (L) and United Nations (UN) Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon hold the IPCC report on global warming. The Nobel-winning IPCC group of climate scientists issued their starkest warning yet on global warming, prompting a UN demand for politicians to smash the deadlock on tackling the worsening threat.(AFP/Diego Tuson)
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