United Nations Climate experts from more than 130 nations wrapped up their meetings in Valencia, Spain on Saturday, presenting a summary of more than 3,000 pages of scientific reports produced on global warming in the past year.
The 26-page summary, agreed upon by the members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) after several days of debate, will be provided to environmental ministers and policy makers from around the world before the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia next month.
The Bali Conference will focus on creating a two-year timetable for negotiating a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which is currently the main UN plan for fighting global warming. The Kyoto Protocol only applies to 36 industrialized nations (not including the U.S. and China) through 2012.
The summary brings together information from three separate reports published by the IPCC in February, April and May of 2007 asserting that mankind is responsible for global warming. The February report said there was more than 90% probability, or “very likely” that the burning of fossil fuels had caused most of the earth’s warming in the past 50 years.
The April report described the probable worldwide impacts of warming, including food and water shortages, population displacement from rising sea levels and wildlife extinctions.
The May report gave projected costs and timelines for combating global warming. According to the IPCC there is still time to take swift action to avert the most serious effects of global warming at a cost of less than 0.12% of global gross domestic product.
The summary states that annual greenhouse gas emissions from human activity worldwide has increased 70% since 1970, and levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the primary greenhouse gas, have gone way above the range established over the last 650,000 years.
Reportedly, one of the most contentious aspects of the summary–questioned by members of the U.S. delegation–is a list of five reasons for concern. These include risks to threatened ecological systems, risks of extreme weather events, the impacts on poor and elderly populations and risks of “large-scale singularities,” such as rising sea levels.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon spoke to the IPCC on Saturday, after visiting Antarctica and the Amazon in recent weeks to view the causes and effects of climate change personally. He said, “I come to you humbled after seeing some of the most precious treasures of our planet — treasures that are being threatened by humanity’s own hand,” he said.
“These scenes are as frightening as a science fiction movie,” Ban added. “But they are even more terrifying, because they are real.”
Concerning the IPCC’s intensive debates over the summary, IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri said in a Reuters interview, “This has been a very tough week and we’ve had to debate and defend everything we wanted but the draft report that we submitted has remained intact and has even had additions made in terms of emphasis and even facts that have come to light.”
At the conclusion of the Panel’s negotiations the entire assembly stood in ovation.
The IPCC, which was created in 1988 to give governments scientific advice on climate change, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize this year along with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.
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