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BRUSSELS : Hundreds of scientists struggled to find compromise wording Thursday on a landmark report set to declare that climate change is already discernible and could wreak devastation to human settlement and wildlife this century.
Grouped in national delegations, the climate specialists remained huddled in a European Commission conference room late into the night, hammering out the document's all-important summary for policy makers -- a guideline for government action -- only hours before its scheduled release Friday morning.
Several sharp disagreements impeded progress, one Western delegate said.
Whereas Europeans sought to include stronger language and hard numbers warning about the dangers of global warming, the United States favored general statements about trends, he said.
"The Europeans want to send a strong signal. The US does not want as much quantification," he said during a break in the negotiations, which have been underway since Monday.
China and Russia, he continued, have sought to excise some passages from the summary asserting that climate change had already had negative effects around the globe, arguing that the data in the 1,400 word main study is not solid enough to be included in the key policy document.
China, which is set to overtake the United States within the next decade or so as the world's single largest emitter of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas driving global warming, is coming under increasing pressure to curb its use of fossil fuels.
The body of the report, a copy of which was obtained by AFP, predicts that damage to Earth's weather systems from greenhouse-house gases will change rainfall patterns, punch up the power of storms, boost the risk of drought, flooding and water stress and accelerate the existing meltdown of glaciers and erosion of ice sheets, the report will say.
The prediction by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are part of its first review in six years of the evidence for man-made climate change.
Saudi Arabia also held up progress, the delegate said, by objecting to the juxtaposition of a table showing the progressively dire consequences of warming as temperatures increase with another table showing the benefits of reducing the emission of carbon dioxide.
With a few exceptions, the news is relentlessly bad for virtually all of Earth's population, but poor tropical countries -- the least to blame for the fossil-fuel pollution that drives global warming -- will be hit worst.
Worsening water shortages in thirsty countries, malnutrition caused by desiccated fields, property damage from extreme weather events and the spread of disease by mosquitoes and other vectors will amount to a punishing bill that is beyond the ability of vulnerable countries, especially in Africa, to pay.
Biodiversity and natural habitat are in for a hammering.
Even a modest increase in temperatures will bleach many coral reefs, reduce part of eastern Amazonia to a parched savannah, thaw swathes of the northern hemisphere's permafrost, change seasons for plant pollination and animal reproduction. The planet could be placed on the fast track to a mass die-out.
"Roughly 20-30 percent... of species assessed so far are likely to be at increasingly high risk of extinction if global mean temperatures exceed 2-3 C (3.6-5.4 F) above pre-industrial levels," the scientists are expected to say.
"By 2080, it is likely that 1.1 to 3.2 billion people will be experiencing water scarcity," says a draft of the summary, explaining that the figure depends on world population growth, energy use and the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
In the first volume of its report, issued in February, the IPCC said Earth's temperature had already risen by 0.74 C (1.33 F) in the past century.
By 2100, it could rise by 1.1 C (1.98 F) and 6.4 C (11.52 F) compared to 1980-99 levels, with a likely range of 1.8 C to 4.0 C (3.2-7.2 F).
- AFP
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