Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Emergency Climate Summit?

On Tuesday the UN environment agency pressured new Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to call an emergency climate summit. The summit, which would likely take place in September, would include about twenty world leaders and push for a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol.

On Friday, the broadest scientific study of the human effect on the climate is set to conclude there is at least a 90 percent chance that human activities, mainly burning fossil fuels, are to blame for most of the warming in the last 50 years.
In a previous report in 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the link was at least 66 percent certain. IPCC experts are meeting in Paris to discuss and approve the draft report.
The report is also set to warn that average global temperatures will rise to 2.0 to 4.5 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 8.1 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels by 2100, with a ''best estimate'' of a 3.0 C (5.4 F) rise, scientists say.
Another section of the report, due in April, is expected to warn that between 1.1 and 3.2 billion people will face water shortages by the end of the century and hundreds of millions will go hungry, according to Australia's The Age newspaper.
Coastal flooding will hit another 7 million homes.

Visit us at www.irejn.org.

No comments: