Sea levels and extreme weather in focus for UN report

CLOUD formation, sea level rises and extreme weather events are among areas set to get more attention in the next UN report on global warming due in 2014, the head of the Nobel Peace Prize winning panel has said.

Rajendra Pachauri also said the panel did not plan to issue more frequent reports as suggested by some governments, reckoning that several years were needed to come up with robust findings. The last series of reports was in 2007.

“We would certainly have much more greater detail,” in the next reports, Pachauri said from Venice, where leading scientists have been meeting to work on an outline to be approved later this year.

“In the case of clouds we will certainly provide much greater emphasis in this report – clouds, aerosols, black carbon. These are issues we will certainly cover in much greater detail,” he said.

The 2007 report pointed to cloud formation as a big uncertainty in climate change. Warmer air can absorb more moisture and so lead to more clouds in some regions – the white tops can reflect heat back into space and offset any warming.

In an opposite effect, black carbon – or soot from sources such as factories or forest fires – can blanket ice and snow with a heat-absorbent dark layer and so accelerate a thaw.

“Sea level rise is another issue that... will get much greater in-depth attention,” he said.

Scenarios for sea level rise this century in the 2007 report ranged from 18cm to 59cm. But it said that 59cm should not be considered an upper limit because of uncertainties about a possible melt of Greenland and Antarctica.

And the panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is also planning an extra report on extreme events such as droughts, floods, heat waves or mudslides projected because of global warming.

Pachauri said the next IPCC report, which shared the 2007 Nobel Prize with former US vice president Al Gore, aimed to guide nations after the planned agreement of a new UN climate treaty in Copenhagen in December.

He welcomed an agreement by major economies at a G8 summit in Italy last week to recognise a broad scientific view that world temperature rises should not exceed 2C above pre-industrial times. But he said too little was being done to achieve the limit.