14 DAY TRIAL // An international team will publish in February 2007, at Nairobi, the long-awaited Fourth Assessment on global warming that will be revealing a much stronger evidence of manmade climate shift.
The multi-volume U.N. assessment "might provide just the right impetus to get the negotiations going in a more purposeful way," (with the world's governments) said Rajendra K. Pachauri.
He leads the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a global network of about 2,000 researchers monitoring how carbon dioxide and manmade greenhouse effect gases are affecting the climate.
In 2001's Third Assessment, the organization blamed on manmade greenhouse effect gases the temperature rise of 0.6 degrees Celsius (1 degree Fahrenheit) in the past century.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol required a decreasing by 5 % below the 1990 level by 2012 of the greenhouse effect gases in 35 industrialized nations, but US and Australia rejected it for economical reasons.
US is by far the world's biggest emitter of warming gases, thus the Protocol is not so effective without US signature. Scientists are already thinking in quotas that must be imposed after 2012 and hope that their support will make the parties understand the gravity of the situation.
"It's bound to have a major impact," Pachauri said.
The heavily detailed document will offer significantly stronger evidence. Sea waters have reached a level unseen in the last 12,000 years, due to rapid ocean water warming the past 30 years, with an increase rate of 2 mm annually between 1961 and 2003, and by more than 3 mm annually since 1993.
Greenland has been losing ice annually at an astonishing rate of 112 cubic kilometers (27 cubic miles). Powerful supercomputers allowed the scientific community to get more accurate models in predicting climate change.
In the 2001 assessment, temperatures were predicted to rise in this century between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius (2.5 and 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit), depending a lot on governments' actions.
The 2007 rapport is expected to have narrowed this increase 2 to 4.5 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit).
Warming by only 1 or 2 degrees of the climates will bring harmful effects for agriculture, ecosystems, and economy, not to mention more extreme weather events, like hurricanes.
Ever-deeper ice-core samples taken in Antarctica and Greenland will offer more clues about ancient climates.
This "gives you a solid perspective on what human beings have done to Earth's climate," Pacahuri said.
"Democratic governments will have to take into account the views of the public," he added, hoping that US will sign a climate agreement curtailing greenhouse effect gas emissions.