-Caveat Lector- http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0218-02.htm Published on Sunday, February 18, 2001 in the Toronto Star Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Extreme Storms Darken Global Horizon by Peter Calamai OTTAWA - The smoking gun of global climate change has finally been identified - and it turns out to contain two deadly bullets rather than just one. Leading scientists and senior officials from about 100 governments will officially declare tomorrow in Geneva, Switzerland, that global warming of just over a half-degree Celsius in the past 100 years is definitely having an impact on everything from retreating glaciers to earlier egg-laying by wild birds. ``We now know that the climate is starting to push nature around,'' said Stephen Schneider, a leading U.S. biologist who contributed to the finding. At the same time the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will warn in a report to governments that the most serious threat to humanity isn't the forecast rise of several degrees in global average temperature by 2100 but the projected increase in the number and severity of floods, cyclones, droughts, heat waves and other examples of extreme weather. ``We're going to have more extreme events and more often,'' said John Stone, a senior Canadian climate change official who took part in the IPCC meeting in Geneva. And to cap off the warning, the scientists and bureaucrats will tell policy makers that even costly schemes to adapt to this inevitable climate change won't avoid all the pain, particularly for the world's poorest countries. ``This report tells governments that they can't say, 'don't worry about climate change because societies and economies adapt all the time,' '' said University of Guelph geography professor Barry Smit, an expert in environmental adaptation. The report summarizes about 1,000 pages of detailed scrutiny by top scientists of all the recent research into the impacts of climate change on the Earth's biological and physical systems and the best ways for people to lessen the effects or adapt to them. Most dramatic of the many messages is the emphasis on the damaging effects of extreme climate events on people and ecosystems. And the most straightforward such impact is a surge in the number of blistering hot days that would accompany any rise in average temperatures. Standard statistical calculations quoted by Environment Canada found a 4-degree rise in Toronto's average temperature would increase the risk of summer days over 30.5 C from the current 10 per cent to 50 per cent. More difficult to correlate precisely with a specific rise in global temperatures is the increase in catastrophes like Hurricane Mitch in Central America, which claimed more than 9,000 lives, or Eastern Canada's 1998 ice storm, which caused more than$3 billion in losses. But the big international insurance companies are convinced, says the report. Economic losses from weather catastrophes have rocketed from an inflation-adjusted $4 billion annually in the 1950s to $40 billion last decade. Adding up all extreme weather events more than doubles the current yearly bill, according to the IPCC's Summary for Policy Makers. A near-final draft of the 19-page report was obtained by The Star from sources in Canada. Scientists at the Geneva meeting confirmed the key points, including changes made during four days of tough negotiations among government delegations. The report being issued tomorrow is the second shot in two months from the IPCC, a unique UN forum where scientists and policy-makers hammer out a consensus about the facts of climate change roughly every five years. The IPCC report amounts to an official stamp of approval by most governments and almost all the top-ranking climate scientists. It is expected to turn up the pressure for real action by countries, like Canada, whose greenhouse gas emissions have shot up rather than shrunk. Last month another IPCC science working group said ``there is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activity,'' meaning the release of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from fossil fuels. Now this second IPCC working group is declaring that ``there is high confidence that regional changes in temperatures have had discernible impacts on many physical and biological systems.'' University of Guelph's Smit, one of two dozen senior authors for the report, said this definitive IPCC pronouncement marks a crucial shift in the political debate. ``With the scientific evidence for climate change overwhelming, the political debate is focusing on whether the expected changes are dangerous or not.'' Rating the changes dangerous would trigger an action provision in the U.N. agreement on climate change, signed by 154 countries at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. Foot-dragging by some rich, industrialized countries, special pleading by Canada and outright opposition from oil states has so far stymied talks to put teeth into the agreement. This most recent IPCC report still leaves recalcitrant countries a loophole to wiggle out of complying with the climate change treaty. Although the IPCC has declared that humanity's activities are responsible for most of the temperature increases in the past 50 years and that those temperature increases have caused ``discernible impacts'' on the environment, the Geneva meeting stopped short of connecting the two statements. Conspicuously absent in the final report was the logical conclusion that humanity's activities are responsible for these new climate impacts on the environment. Scientists already have enough evidence of the causal link to satisfy the level of proof in a civil lawsuit - the balance of probabilities. But gaps in long-term observations in the tropics and over oceans mean they can't meet the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt level demanded by some governments in the IPCC process. ``We're establishing that there is smoke at the end of the barrel,'' said Schneider, a professor at California's Stanford University and one of the leading authors of the IPCC report. Copyright 1996-2001. 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