(NaturalNews) Representatives of the international scientific community met Monday in Paris to commence a weeklong conference on global climate change, the climax of which will be reached Friday when a comprehensive United Nations report will be released.
The report, authored by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is the product of more than six years of research, and the combined effort of more than 500 scientists.
“At no time in the past has there been such an appetite” for information on global climate change, said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the panel, addressing the meeting being held in the headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Although some critics of the IPCC’s reports -- the last of which was released in 2001 -- call them alarmist, early drafts of this year’s report seem to paint a less apocalyptic picture than earlier forecasts had envisioned.
According to an early draft of the report, by 2100 the sea level will have risen between 5 and 23 inches, a far more conservative estimate than the 20 to 55 inch rise predicted this month by a study published in the journal Science.
The IPCC, which was assembled by the UN in 1988, relies on input from hundreds of scientists and industry researchers to assemble and collate the data contained in the reports. The final reports must be approved by a unanimous vote of 154 governments, most of which have a vested interest in fossil fuel production or supply.
It is this background that gives pause to some critics that say the reports are not alarmist enough. Additionally, critics are concerned over the omission of incidents and facts in the report that seem to herald much more drastic changes.
Such omissions include the disappearance of Antarctica’s Larsen B ice shelf, which once spanned 1,255 square miles and melted in 35 days in 2002, or recent NASA data that shows a 53 cubic-mile-per-year loss of ice in Greenland that amounts to twice the amount of loss measured in 1996.
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