Nations issue road map to deal with warming

BANGKOK, Thailand - Described as a road map for curbing global warming, a report was approved Friday by delegates from 120 countries that lays out what they said was an affordable arsenal of tools that must be rushed into place to avert a disastrous spike in temperatures.

But a U.S. official raised concern about the economic costs.

The report, a summary of a study by a U.N. network of 2,000 scientists, said the world has to make significant cuts in emissions through increasing the energy efficiency of buildings and vehicles, shifting from fossil fuels to renewable fuels, and reforming both the forestry and farming sectors.

The document made clear that nations have the technology and money to decisively act in time to avoid a sharp rise in temperatures that scientists say would wipe out species, raise ocean levels, wreak economic havoc and trigger droughts in some places and flooding in others.

Under the most stringent scenario, the report said the world must stabilize the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by 2015 — eight years from now — at 445 parts per million to keep global temperatures from rising more than 3.6 degrees over pre-industrial levels.

For the past year, many prominent scientists have warned that allowing greenhouse gases to surpass 450 parts per million would make dangerous climate change more likely, particularly the melting of Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets.

'Playing with fire here'
“There are many who feel 450 parts per million is a threshold that we don’t want to go across and that we want to stabilize CO2 concentrations at that level,” said Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. “We’re playing with fire here.”

Going beyond 450 ppm means “there’s a good chance that we would be committed to the melt of the Greenland ice sheets. While it might take centuries, that would give us five to six (yards) of sea level rise,” Mann said, adding that would mean island nations would be lost and much of the U.S. East Coast, one-third of Florida and all of New Orleans “would be submerged.”

The biggest heat-trapping gas, carbon dioxide, is currently measured at over 380 parts per million in the atmosphere. It's sometimes trickier to measure the impact of methane and other greenhouse gases produced by industry, transport and agriculture, but they're estimated to bring the total up to about 430 ppm of "carbon dioxide equivalent."

Delegates said the approval of the report should conclusively debunk arguments by skeptics that combating global warming was too costly, that it would stifle development in poorer countries, or that the temperature rise had gone too far to change.

"If we continue doing what we are doing now, we are in deep trouble," said Ogunlade Davidson, the co-chair of group responsible for finalizing the report this week.

Delegates hailed the policy statement as a key advance toward battling global warming and setting the stage for an even stronger international agreement to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse emissions when it expires in 2012.

"It's stunning in its brilliance and relevance," Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the group responsible for the report, the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said of the study. "It's a remarkable step forward."

"Clearly, the signs that the IPCC assess will have a direct and profound influence on the discussion that take place and the direction toward (a post-Kyoto) agreement," he said.

Bush administration view
The United States was pleased that the report "highlights the importance of a portfolio of clean energy technologies consistent with our approach," said the head of the U.S. delegation, Harlan Watson.

The report acknowledges that the 445 ppm goal is difficult, requiring all nations to deploy the best available technologies. And the U.S and Chinese delegations here complained that attempting to meet the stringent target would be too economically damaging.

"That would, of course, cause a global recession. So that is something we'd probably want to avoid," said James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. "Our goal is reducing emissions and growing the economy."

Coming out of the meeting, delegates said science appeared to have trumped politics — especially opposition from booming China, which felt the 445 ppm floor was too low.

Beijing, the second-largest emitter after the United States, and its supporters had argued that moves to make deep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions risked stifling its spectacular economic growth, delegates said.

Zhou Dadi, a Chinese author in the report and a researcher at the country's top planning agency, denied China had "opposed" the key findings and was only working to improve the text.

"The Chinese government was constructive and was contributing to making the report reflect the science," Zhou said. "We are not threatened by the report."

In Europe, several countries and the European Union welcomed the report.

"The report shows — and this is encouraging — that ambitious climate protection is economically manageable," German government spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm said.

At a briefing in Berlin, the U.N.'s top climate change official, Yvo de Boer, said the report "clearly rebuts fears that economic development and wealth conflict with active protection of the climate."

Delegates had wrestled over how to share the burden of cutting emissions, how much such measures would cost, and how much weight to give certain policy measures, such as advanced nuclear power, an option supported by the United States.

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