UN: Mankind ‘95% likely’ to blame for global warming

UN experts met to review a draft report that raises the probability that climate change is man-made to 95% and warns of ever more extreme weather unless governments act.

Scientists and officials from more than 110 governments began a four-day meeting in Stockholm to edit and approve the 31-page draft that also tries to explain a “hiatus” in the pace of global warming this century despite rising greenhouse gas emissions.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will go through the document line by line and present it on Friday as a main guide for governments, which have agreed to work out a UN deal by the end of 2015 to fight global warming.

“I expect the world will understand the simplicity and the gravity of the message that we provide,” said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC.

Climate change “will transform our lives, our economies and indeed the way our planet will function in the future”, Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environment Programme, told delegates.

A shift towards a greener economy, based on renewable energies, would hold multiple benefits for society, said Steiner.

IPCC drafts say human activities, primarily burning fossil fuels, are “extremely likely” — at least a 95% probability — to be the main cause of global warming since the 1950s.

That is up from “very likely”, or at least a 90% probability, in the 2007 report, and 66% in 2001.

One of the hardest issues for the IPCC may be accounting for why temperatures have not risen much this century.

A combination of natural variations, including a cyclical dip in energy emitted by the sun, and factors such as volcanic eruptions — which send ash into the atmosphere and help block sunlight — have caused the hiatus in temperature increases, it says, predicting a resumption of warming in coming years.