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Report Has 'Smoking Gun' on Climate

By SETH BORENSTEIN (AP Science Writer)

>From Associated Press

January 22, 2007 8:50 PM EST

 

WASHINGTON - Human-caused global warming is here - visible in the air,

water and melting ice - and is destined to get much worse in the

future, an authoritative global scientific report will warn next week.

 

" The smoking gun is definitely lying on the table as we speak, " said

top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who reviewed all 1,600 pages

of the first segment of a giant four-part report. " The evidence ... is

compelling. "

 

Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist and study co-author, went

even further: " This isn't a smoking gun; climate is a batallion of

intergalactic smoking missiles. "

 

The first phase of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is

being released in Paris next week. This segment, written by more than

600 scientists and reviewed by another 600 experts and edited by

bureaucrats from 154 countries, includes " a significantly expanded

discussion of observation on the climate, " said co-chair Susan Solomon,

a senior scientist for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Administration. She and other scientists held a telephone briefing on

the report Monday.

 

That report will feature an " explosion of new data " on observations of

current global warming, Solomon said.

 

Solomon and others wouldn't go into specifics about what the report

says. They said that the 12-page summary for policymakers will be

edited in secret word-by-word by governments officials for several days

next week and released to the public on Feb. 2. The rest of that first

report from scientists will come out months later.

 

The full report will be issued in four phases over the year, as was the

case with the last IPCC report, issued in 2001.

 

Global warming is " happening now, it's very obvious, " said Mahlman,

a

former director of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab who lives in

Boulder, Colo. " When you look at the temperature of the Earth, it's

pretty much a no-brainer. "

 

Look for an " iconic statement " - a simple but strong and unequivocal

summary - on how global warming is now occurring, said one of the

authors, Kevin Trenberth, director of climate analysis at the National

Center for Atmospheric Research, also in Boulder.

 

The February report will have " much stronger evidence now of human

actions on the change in climate that's taken place, " Rajendra K.

Pachauri told the AP in November. Pachauri, an Indian climatologist, is

the head of the international climate change panel.

 

An early version of the ever-changing draft report said " observations

of coherent warming in the global atmosphere, in the ocean, and in snow

and ice now provide stronger joint evidence of warming. "

 

And the early draft adds: " An increasing body of evidence suggests a

discernible human influence on other aspects of climate including sea

ice, heat waves and other extremes, circulation, storm tracks and

precipitation. "

 

The world's global average temperature has risen about 1.2 degrees

Fahrenheit from 1901 to 2005. The two warmest years on record for the

world were 2005 and 1998. Last year was the hottest year on record for

the United States.

 

The report will draw on already published peer-review science. Some

recent scientific studies show that temperatures are the hottest in

thousands of years, especially during the last 30 years; ice sheets in

Greenland in the past couple years have shown a dramatic melting; and

sea levels are rising and doing so at a faster rate in the past decade.

 

Also, the second part of the international climate panel's report - to

be released in April - will for the first time feature a blockbuster

chapter on how global warming is already changing health, species,

engineering and food production, said NASA scientist Cynthia

Rosenzweig, author of that chapter.

 

As confident as scientists are about the global warming effects that

they've already documented, they are as gloomy about the future and

even hotter weather and higher sea level rises. Predictions for the

future of global warming in the report are based on 19 computer models,

about twice as many as in the past, Solomon said.

 

In 2001, the panel said the world's average temperature would increase

somewhere between 2.5 and 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit and the sea level

would rise between 4 and 35 inches by the year 2100. The 2007 report

will likely have a smaller range of numbers for both predictions,

Pachauri and other scientists said.

 

The future is bleak, scientists said.

 

" We have barely started down this path, " said chapter co-author Richard

Alley of Penn State University.

 

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AP Special Correspondent Charles J. Hanley contributed to this report.

 

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On the Net:

 

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: http://www.ipcc.ch/

 

 

" Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies

in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are

cold and are not clothed. "

-- Dwight Eisenhower