UN climate report: already out of date?

UN climate report: already out of date?

Agence France-Presse

Last updated 09:51am (Mla time) 11/10/2007

PARIS -- Fresh from winning the Nobel Peace Prize, the UN's top

scientific panel on climate change will meet in the Spanish port city

of Valencia Monday to finalize a landmark report on global warming and

how to avoid its worst ravages.

But beneath its newly-won fame, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

Change (IPCC) is under intensifying scrutiny about some of its key

processes.

Some voices, including from within the IPCC itself, fear the panel's

grand report will be badly out of date before it is even printed.

Others quietly criticize the organization as being too conservative in

its appreciation of the climate threat.

The document to be issued in Valencia next Friday boils down a

2,500-page, three-volume assessment issued earlier this year, the

first IPCC review of climate change since 2001.

The upcoming "synthesis report," comprising a summary for policymakers

of 25 pages, and a technical document of around 70 pages, puts in a

nutshell the evidence for climate change, its likely impacts and the

options for tackling it.

The analysis carries huge political weight. It will be a compass for

guiding action on climate change for years to come, starting with a

crucial UN conference in Bali next month.

But some experts are worried, fearing that the IPCC's ponderous

machinery, which gives birth to a new review only every five or six

years, is falling dangerously behind with what's happening to Earth's

climate systems.

The new report notably fails to take into account a batch of dramatic

recent evidence, including the shrinkage of the Arctic ice cap,

glacier loss in Greenland, a surge in levels of atmospheric carbon

dioxide (CO2) and an apparent slowing of Earth's ability to absorb

greenhouse gases, they say.

Taken together, say the sources, these phenomena suggest climate

change is be occurring faster than expected -- and may even unleash

"tipping points" that could uncontrollably accelerate the damage.

"Over the past several years we have realized ... that the speed at

which changes can occur -- such as ice sheet disintegration and

resulting sea level rise -- is much faster than IPCC has estimated,"

leading climatologist James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard

Institute for Space Studies in New York, told Agence France-Presse.

"We are now in a situation where the luxury of super-caution and

reticence poses a danger for the planet and all its creatures," he

said.

French scientist Jean Jouzel, who has been deeply involved in the IPCC

report, acknowledges that its estimates about rising sea levels --

which could affect hundreds of millions of people -- are half of what

more recent studies indicate.

Another weakness of the IPCC, say others, is a tendency to shy away

from controversy.

The more forceful the panel's conclusions, the more pressure it will

put on policymakers to adopt measures -- some of them politically

costly -- ranging from carbon taxes and mandatory caps on CO2

emissions to massive investment in renewable energy.

Too often, draft text that highlights the possible consequences of

warming gets watered down in the final version, say these critics.

British scientist James Lovelock blames the consensus rule that

governs IPCC proceedings, enabling government representatives to

meddle with "forthright and inconvenient forecasts" made by experts.

"The IPCC has a history and a habit of ignoring many of the big issues

that hint at policy or policy analysis," agreed Tom Downing, director

of the Oxford Office of the Stockholm Environment Institute and a lead

author of the report.

He pointed to the draft report to be hammered out in Valencia, saying

it had "barely a page" on vulnerability to climate change and how to

cope with it.

The IPCC, jointly launched 20 years ago by the UN Environmental

Program (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), shared

this year's Nobel Peace Prize with former US Vice President Al Gore.

Pep Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project based in

Australia, says the panel's caution and rigor had helped create

awareness that climate change was a genuine and pressing issue.

But it was time for the IPCC to move to a faster and more assertive

track, Canadell suggested.

"We are no longer in the business of convincing governments that the

problem is real," he told AFP. "The issue now is what to do and how

fast it needs to be done."

--

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to

escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. -- Marcus Aurelius

Wherever I go it will be well with me, for it was well with me here, not

on account of the place, but of my judgments which I shall carry away

with me, for no one can deprive me of these; on the contrary, they alone

are my property, and cannot be taken away, and to possess them suffices

me wherever I am or whatever I do. -- EPICTETUS

Joseph R. Darancette

daranc@NOSPAMcharter.net