World scientists meet in Paris to finish climate report

Scientists from around the world gathered in Paris today to complete a long-awaited, authoritative report on climate change, expected to give a grim warning of rising temperatures and sea levels worldwide.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is to unveil its latest assessment of the environmental threat posed by global warming on Friday.

As the panel meets, the planet is the warmest it has been in thousands of years - if not more – and international concern over what to do about it is at an all-time high.

“At no time in the past has there been such a global appetite” for reliable information on global warming, the panel’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, told the conference.

Scientists are keeping quiet about the report’s contents, but say it is both more specific and more sweeping than the panel’s previous efforts.

Activists say the panel is too cautious, delaying urgently-needed government action. Greenpeace strung a banner across the Eiffel Tower urging action against climate change, that read: it’s not too late.

Early drafts of the document give a somewhat less alarming picture than that of the last report, in 2001, foreseeing smaller sea level rises than previously predicted. But many top scientists reject the new figures, saying they are not new enough. They do not include the recent melt-off of big ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

That debate may be central at this week’s meetings at the Unesco headquarters in Paris. After four days of closed-door editing involving more than 500 experts, they will release the first of four global warming reports by the IPCC expected this year.

“We are hoping that it will convince people that climate change is real and that we have a responsibility for much of it, and that we really do have to make changes in how we live,” said Kenneth Denman, one of the report’s authors.

The panel, created by the United Nations in 1988, releases its assessments every five or six years – although scientists have been observing climate change since the 1960s.

While critics call the panel overly alarmist, it is by nature relatively cautious because it relies on input from hundreds of scientists, including sceptics and industry researchers. And its reports must be unanimous, approved by 154 governments – including the United States and oil-rich countries such as Saudi Arabia.