Climate report too rosy, warn experts

CLIMATE scientists will, this week, issue a dire forecast for the planet that warns of slowly rising sea levels and higher temperatures. But that may be the sugarcoated version.

Early and changeable drafts of their upcoming authoritative report on climate change foresee smaller sea level rises than were projected in 2001 in the last report. Many top US scientists reject these rosier numbers.

Those calculations don’t include the recent, and dramatic, melt-off of big ice sheets in two crucial locations.

They “don’t take into account the gorillas — Greenland and Antarctica”, said Ohio State University earth sciences professor Lonnie Thompson, a polar ice specialist.

Michael MacCracken, who until 2001 coordinated the official US government reviews of the international climate report on global warming, has fired off a letter of protest over the omission.

The melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are a fairly recent development that has taken scientists by surprise. They don’t know how to predict its effects in their computer models. But many fear it will mean the world’s coastlines are swamped.

Others believe the ice melt is temporary.