Gauntlet thrown on climate challenge

Given the complexity of climate change, researchers produced a remarkably slim summary last month. At just 23 pages, no policymaker can be excused from not knowing the facts ahead of the crucial meeting in Bali, Indonesia, this month. This is the key document on the current assessment of climate change. It is the tightly distilled, peer-reviewed work of several thousand researchers and endorsed by all the world's major governments. Its official name is the Policymakers' Summary of the Synthesis Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment. This report is so important because it provides one concise, easily readable but comprehensive text of facts, figures and diagrams — in short, all the information needed by policymakers. The report has been distilled from more than 3,000 pages of research published in three separate parts of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report during 2007 — on the science of climate change, its potential impacts, and the possible remedies. These individual sections published in Paris in February, in Brussels in April, and in Bangkok in May, spelled out comprehensively that the Earth could warm by an average of up to News focus The new slim scientific summary of global warming packs a punch for the policymakers' meeting in Bali to agree measures to combat greenhouse gas emissions this month. Nigel Williams reports. 6ºC during the current century, and that this would be catastrophic in its impact on human society, most of all the poor developing countries; but they also offered hope that the problem was solvable, if the governments took rapid and decisive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions causing the warming. The IPCC, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize this year (along with former US vice-president Al Gore) for its efforts to raise awareness of climate change, was set up by the UN in 1988 and published its first assessment report, sounding the initial warning about rising temperatures, in 1990. It issued subsequent reports in 1995 and 2001 but this year's fourth assessment has an importance all its own. This is the one where scientists now feel confident enough to Ravaged: Last month's cyclone in the Bay of Bengal could be sign of increasing tropical storm threats as the world's climate warms.