Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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"The world's scientists have spoken clearly and with one voice"
- UN Secretary-General

"North Americans will experience longer and hotter heat waves and greater
competition for water"

UN Panel Gives Dire Warming Forecast
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Technology/WireStory?id=3880952&page=2

UN Panel Warns of Human Suffering, Species Extinction Due to Climate Change
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, from South Korea, right, are seen next to
Chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
Rajendra Pachauiri from India, center, and Michel Jarraud,
Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization, left, during a
press conference after the IPCC XXVII closing ceremony at the City of the
Arts and Sciences complex in Valencia, Spain. Saturday, Nov. 17, 2007.
After a weeklong conference the IPCC released a concise guide to
policymakers describing observations of the changing climate, the
potentially disastrous impacts of global warming and the tools available to
slow the warming trend. (AP Photo/Fernando Bustamante) 
The Associated Press
By ARTHUR MAX Associated Press Writer
VALENCIA, Spain Nov 17, 2007 (AP)

Global warming is "unequivocal" and carbon dioxide already in the
atmosphere commits the world to sea levels rising an average of up to 4.6
feet, the world's top climate experts warned Saturday in their most
authoritative report to date.

"Only urgent, global action will do," said U.N. Secretary-General Ban
Ki-Moon, calling on the United States and China the world's two biggest
polluters to do more to slow global climate change.

"I look forward to seeing the U.S. and China playing a more constructive
role," Ban told reporters. "Both countries can lead in their own way."

Ban, however, advised against assigning blame.

Climate change imperils "the most precious treasures of our planet," he
said, and the effects are "so severe and so sweeping that only urgent
global action will do. We are all in this together. We must work together."

According to the U.N. panel of scientists, whose latest report is a
synthesis of three previous ones, enough carbon dioxide already has built
up that it imperils islands, coastlines and a fifth to two-thirds of the
world's species.

As early as 2020, 75 million to 250 million people in Africa will suffer
water shortages, residents of Asia's large cities will be at great risk of
river and coastal flooding, according to the report.

Europeans can expect extensive species loss, and North Americans will
experience longer and hotter heat waves and greater competition for water,
says the report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
which shared the Nobel Prize with Al Gore this year.

The panel portrays the Earth hurtling toward a warmer climate at a
quickening pace and warns of inevitable human suffering. It says emissions
of carbon, mainly from fossil fuels, must stabilize by 2015 and go down
after that.

In the best-case scenario, temperatures will keep rising from carbon
already in the atmosphere, the report said. Even if factories were shut
down today and cars taken off the roads, the average sea level will reach
as high as 4.6 feet above that in the preindustrial period, or about 1850.

"We have already committed the world to sea level rise," the panel's
chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, said. But if the Greenland ice sheet melts,
the scientists said, they could not predict by how many feet the seas will
rise, drowning coastal cities.

Climate change is here, they said, as witnessed by melting snow and
glaciers, higher average temperatures and rising sea levels. If unchecked,
global warming will spread hunger and disease, put further stress on water
resources, cause fiercer storms and more frequent droughts, and could drive
up to 70 percent of plant and animal species to extinction, according to
the panel's report.

The report was adopted after five days of sometimes tense negotiations
among 140 national delegations. It lays out blueprints for avoiding the
worst catastrophes and various possible outcomes, depending on how quickly
and decisively action is taken.

"The world's scientists have spoken clearly and with one voice," Ban said,
looking ahead to an important climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, next
month. "I expect the world's policy makers to do the same."

The report is intended to both set the stage and serve as a guide for the
conference, at which world leaders will begin discussing a global climate
change treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

That treaty, which expires in 2012, required industrial nations to reduce
greenhouse gases and a smooth transition to a new treaty is needed to avoid
upsetting the fledgling carbon markets.

"This report will have an incredible political impact," Yvo de Boer, the
U.N.'s top climate change official, told The Associated Press. "It's a
signal that politicians cannot afford to ignore."

The United States opted out of Kyoto in 2001, arguing that the science was
unproven and that the burden of mandatory emission cuts was unfair since it
excluded fast-growing China and India.

Chief U.S. delegate Sharon Hays said doubts have been dispelled. "What's
changed since 2001 is the scientific certainty that this is happening," she
said in a conference call late Friday. She did not indicate that Washington
would abandon its policy of voluntary emission cuts.

Sharon Hays, a White House science official and head of the U.S.
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 in a conference call to reporters late Friday. "Back
in 2001 the IPCC report said it is likely that humans were having an impact
on the climate," but confidence in human responsibility had increased since
then.

"What's new is the clarity of the signal, how clear the scientific message
is," said Yvo de Boer, the U.N.'s top climate change official. "The
politicians have no excuse not to act."

Opening with a sweeping statement directed at climate change skeptics, the
summary declares that climate systems have already begun to change.

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

Advocacy 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.