TAI Alert #3 - U.N. climate panel to project wrenching change

A U.N. climate panel projects wrenching disruptions to nature by 2100 in a report blaming human use of fossil fuels more clearly than ever for global warming, scientific sources said. A draft report based on work by 2,500 scientists and due for release on February 2 in Paris, draws on research showing greenhouse gases at their highest levels for 650,000 years, fuelling a warming likely to bring more droughts, floods and rising seas. The IPCC will say it is at least 90 percent sure that human activities, led by burning fossil fuels, are to blame for a warming over the past 50 years

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may have some good news, however, by toning down chances of the biggest temperature and sea level rises projected in the IPCC's previous 2001 study, the sources said. But it will also revise up its lowest projections. Additionally, the new report is likely to foresee a rise in temperatures of 2 to 4.5 Celsius (3.6-8.1 Fahrenheit) this century, with about 3 Celsius (5.4F) most likely. The European Union says any temperature rise above 2C (3.6F) will cause "dangerous" change, for instance with more heatwaves like in Europe in 2003 that killed 35,000 people.

Benjamin Santer, a climate scientist at the U.S. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said "The system is telling us an internally consistent story -- you can't explain the observed changes ... in the climate system over the second half of the 20th century by invoking natural causes."

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http://today.reuters. com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyid=2007-01- 23T155044Z_01_L23924623_RTRUKOC_0_US-GLOBALWARMING.xml &src=rss&rpc=22"

John L. Petersen