Ban Ki-moon praises global warming report

The Earth is hurtling toward a warmer age at a quickening pace, a Nobel-winning UN scientific panel said in a landmark report today, warning of inevitable human suffering and the threat of species extinction.

The report also offered blueprints to avert the worst catastrophes. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said climate change imperils “the most precious treasures of our planet”.

The potential impact of global warming is “so severe and so sweeping that only urgent, global action will do,” Ban told the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Valencia, Spain, after it issued its fourth and final report this year.

The IPCC, following six days of sometimes tense negotiations, adopted a concise briefing paper on the science of climate change and the effects of human-produced greenhouse gases. It lays out various scenarios of future impacts, depending on how quickly and decisively action is taken.

The Summary for Policymakers, and a longer version called the synthesis report, distil thousands of pages of data and computer models resulting from six years of research compiled by the IPCC.

It will be a how-to guide for policy makers meeting next month in Bali, Indonesia, who will begin discussing a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, which requires 36 industrial countries to reduce carbon emissions by an average five percent from 1990 levels by 2012.

UN experts say a new global plan must be in place by 2009 to ensure a smooth transition when the Kyoto terms expire.

“There are real and affordable ways to deal with climate change,” Ban said. He said the Bali talks should set the agenda and a timetable for a post-2012 plan. It must provide for funding to help poor countries adopt clean energy and to adapt to changing climates, he said.

Opening with a sweeping statement directed at climate change sceptics, the summary declares that climate systems unquestionably have already begun to change. The evidence is in the measured warming of air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting snow and ice, and rising sea levels.

It says recent research has heightened concern that the poor and the elderly will suffer most from climate change; hunger and disease will be more common; droughts, floods and heatwaves will afflict the world’s poorest regions; and more animal and plant species will vanish.

Unless action is taken, human activity could lead to “abrupt and irreversible changes” that would make the planet unrecognisable.

Advocate groups hailed the report as indispensable for the 10,000 delegates expected at Bali.

“We expect to see their personal copies of the Synthesis Report return from Bali, battered and worn from frequent use, with paragraphs underlined and notes in the margin,” said Stephanie Tunmore, of Greenpeace.

The World Wide Fund for Nature, another observer of the talks in Valencia, praised the IPCC for issuing a strong report, “despite intense pressure from some governments during the week”.

The report does not commit participating governments to any course of action. But it is important because it is adopted by consensus, meaning those countries accept the underlying science and cannot disavow its conclusions. It provides a common scientific baseline for the political talks.

But differences remain stark on how to control carbon emissions.

While the European Union has taken the lead in enforcing the carbon emission targets outlined in Kyoto, the United States opted out of the 1997 accord.

US President George W. Bush described it as flawed because major developing countries like India and China, which are large carbon emitters, were excluded from any obligations, and he said he preferred a voluntary regime.

Sharon Hays, a White House science official and head of the US delegation, said the certainty of climate change was clearer now than when Bush rejected Kyoto.

“What’s changed since 2001 is the scientific certainty that this is happening,” she said last night. “Back in 2001, the IPCC report said it is ’likely’ that humans were having an impact on the climate, and ’likely’ has a very specific meaning in IPCC reports,” but confidence in human responsibility had increased since then.