Scientists present latest news on climate change

The Associated Press
Published: March 9, 2009

COPENHAGEN: Climate scientists are preparing for bad news as they review the latest data on global warming at a conference this week in Copenhagen, one of the organizers said Monday.
The three-day conference starting Tuesday aims to update the science on climate change since the last U.N. report two years ago. Its conclusions will be presented to policy-makers at a key international climate summit in December.
"The purpose of the conference is to give the best ever information to the politicians," said Katherine Richardson, a scientist at the University of Copenhagen, which is hosting the conference.
Politicians meeting in Copenhagen for the U.N. climate talks in December will discuss a new global agreement on greenhouse gas emissions to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
The scientific cornerstone for those talks is a 2007 report of the International Panel on Climate Change. It collected the work of more than 2,000 scientists and listed the likely effects of global warming: arid regions will grow drier, rising seas will flood coastal areas, melting glaciers will flood communities downstream and then dry up the source of future water supplies, and up to 30 percent of all plant and animal species may become extinct.

However, since then new evidence has emerged showing that ice caps in the Arctic and Antarctic are melting, which threatens to dramatically raise the level of the oceans and flood coastal cities and low-lying islands.
The 2007 report predicted a sea level rise of 7 to 23 inches (18 to 58 centimeters) by the end of the century, which could flood low-lying areas and force millions to flee. Recent data said an additional 3.9 to 7.8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters) rise was possible if the recent melting of polar ice sheets continues.
Sea-level rise is one of the key topics on the program for the scientific congress this week, but there are many other areas in the IPCC report that need updating.
"Certainly the message from the natural science side, the part of science that looks at how the climate system really works, isn't very good," Richardson said. "There isn't any good news to be found there."
Some 1,600 abstracts have been submitted from nearly 80 countries to the conference, which will be attended by IPCC chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri and Nicholas Stern, the author of a British government report on the cost of climate change.
The conclusions will be published around June 1.