http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/2007/01/23/tech-warming.html
Human-caused global warming is here visible in the air, water and
melting ice and is destined to get much worse in the future, an
authoritative global scientific report will warn next week.
"The smoking gun is definitely lying on the table as we speak,"
said top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who reviewed all
1,600 pages of the first segment of a giant four-part report. "The
evidence
is compelling."
The first phase of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is
being released in Paris next week.
This segment, written by more than 600 scientists and reviewed by
another 600 experts and edited by bureaucrats from 154 countries,
includes "a significantly expanded discussion of observation on the
climate," said co-chair Susan Solomon a senior scientist for the
U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
She and other scientists held a telephone briefing on the report
Monday.
'Explosion of new data'
That report will feature an "explosion of new data" on observations
of current global warming, Solomon said.
Solomon and others wouldn't go into specifics about what the report
says. They said that the 12-page summary for policy-makers will be
edited in secret word-by-word by governments officials for several
days next week and released to the public on Feb. 2. The rest of
that first report from scientists will come out months later. The
full report will be issued in four phases over the year, as was the
case with the last IPCC report, issued in 2001.
Global warming is "happening now, it's very obvious," said Mahlman,
a former director of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab who
lives in Boulder, Colo. "When you look at the temperature of the
Earth, it's pretty much a no-brainer."
Look for an "iconic statement" a simple but strong and
unequivocal summary on how global warming is now occurring, said
one of the authors, Kevin Trenberth, director of climate analysis
at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, also in
Boulder.
The February report will have "much stronger evidence now of human
actions on the change in climate that's taken place," Rajendra
Pachauri said in an interview in November. Pachauri, an Indian
climatologist, is the head of the international climate change
panel.
More evidence of warming
An early version of the ever-changing draft report said
"observations of coherent warming in the global atmosphere, in the
ocean, and in snow and ice now provide stronger joint evidence of
warming."
And the early draft adds: "An increasing body of evidence suggests
a discernible human influence on other aspects of climate including
sea ice, heat waves and other extremes, circulation, storm tracks
and precipitation."
The world's global average temperature has risen about 0.66 C from
1901 to 2005. The two warmest years on record for the world were
2005 and 1998. Last year was the hottest year on record for the
United States.
The report will draw on already published peer-review science. Some
recent scientific studies show that temperatures are the hottest in
thousands of years, especially during the last 30 years; ice sheets
in Greenland in the past couple years have shown a dramatic
melting; and sea levels are rising and doing so at a faster rate in
the past decade.
Effects on health, species, food
Also, the second part of the international climate panel's report
to be released in April will for the first time feature a
blockbuster chapter on how global warming is already changing
health, species, engineering and food production, said NASA
scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig, author of that chapter.
As confident as scientists are about the global warming effects
that they've already documented, they are as gloomy about the
future and even hotter weather and higher sea level rises.
Predictions for the future of global warming in the report are
based on 19 computer models, about twice as many as in the past,
Solomon said.
In 2001, the panel said the world's average temperature would
increase somewhere between about 1.4 C and 5.8 C and the sea level
would rise between 10 and 89 centimetres by the year 2100. The 2007
report will likely have a smaller range of numbers for both
predictions, Pachauri and other scientists said.
The future is bleak, scientists said.
"We have barely started down this path," said chapter co-author
Richard Alley of Penn State University.
