Valencia (Spain), November 17
Climate experts agreed a U.N. blueprint late Friday for fighting global warming that warns that governments only have a few years left to avert the worst impacts.
Delegates stood and applauded after chairman Rajendra Pachauri brought down the gavel on the November 12-17 meeting, which approved a summary for policymakers of 3,000 pages of scientific reports published this year.
“This is the strongest report yet by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) but says that there is still time to act,” Bill Hare, an Australian climate scientist who was among the authors, told Reuters.
The document, which gives a summary of the latest scientific knowledge on the causes and effects of climate change, will be put before environment ministers at a meeting next month in Bali, Indonesia.
Many countries hope that Bali will agree a two-year strategy to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the main U.N. plan for fighting warming until 2012, which only covers 36 industrialised nations.
The United States and China, the two main emitters of greenhouse gases, are outside Kyoto.
The summary says that human activity is causing rising
temperatures and that deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, are needed to avert ever more heatwaves, melting glaciers and rising sea levels.
The damage to nature is already as frightening as science fiction, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. Ban said that he had just been on a trip to see ice shelves breaking up in Antarctica and the melting Torres del Paine glaciers in Chile. He also visited the Amazon rainforest, which he said was being ''suffocated'' by global warming.
''I come to you humbled after seeing some of the most precious treasures of our planet -- treasures that are being threatened by humanity's own hand,'' he said.
''These scenes are as frightening as a science fiction movie,'' Ban said. ''But they are even more terrifying, because they are real.''
''The strong message of the IPCC can't be watered down - the science is crystal clear. The hard fact is we have caused climate change, and it's also clear that we hold the solution to stop global warming in our hands,'' said Hans Verolme, Director of environmental group WWF's Global Climate Change Programme.
— Reuters
