Big Climate Report: Warming Is Big Risk For People

[n2doc]

If you think of climate change as a hazard for some far-off polar bears years from now, you're mistaken. That's the message from top climate scientists gathering in Japan this week to assess the impact of global warming.

In fact, they will say, the dangers of a warming Earth are immediate and very human.

"The polar bear is us," says Patricia Romero Lankao of the federally financed National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., referring to the first species to be listed as threatened by global warming due to melting sea ice.

She will be among the more than 60 scientists in Japan to finish writing a massive and authoritative report on the impacts of global warming. With representatives from about 100 governments at this week's meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they'll wrap up a summary that tells world leaders how bad the problem is.

The key message from leaked drafts and interviews with the authors and other scientists: The big risks and overall effects of global warming are far more immediate and local than scientists once thought. It's not just about melting ice, threatened animals and plants. It's about the human problems of hunger, disease, drought, flooding, refugees and war, becoming worse.

more

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=293549929

[marions ghost]

1. K&R

I wish the average person could understand how thin the atmosphere around the earth really is. The atmosphere that sustains us is only about 30 miles over our heads, to the upper edge of the stratosphere. Knowing that fact might help people understand how it is possible that every little bit of pollution counts.

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http://www.albany.edu/faculty/rgk/atm101/structur.htm

[magical thyme]

2. which skeptical website?

"Those chapters haven't been officially released but were posted on a skeptical website."

Would be nice to get a look at the 30 new chapters...

[marions ghost]

3. This would seem to be an important report coming out....soon

yeah what is meant by skeptical website?

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"The panel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, months after it issued its last report.

Since then, the impact group has been reviewing the latest research and writing 30 chapters on warming's effects and regional impacts. Those chapters haven't been officially released but were posted on a skeptical website.

The key message can be summed up in one word that the overall report uses more than 5,000 times: risk.

"Climate change really is a challenge in managing risks," says the report's chief author, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution of Science in California. "It's very clear that we are not prepared for the kind of events we're seeing."

Already the effects of global warming are "widespread and consequential," says one part of the larger report, noting that science has compiled more evidence and done much more research since the last report in 2007."

(more at OP link)