Climate experts: Global warming report 'hijacked by bureaucrats'

RAW STORY

Despite issuing numerous warnings on the future dangers presented by global warming, a UN report issued yesterday on climate was grossly inadequate, some top US scientists are claiming.

"The science got hijacked by the political bureaucrats at the late stage of the game," argued John Walsh, a climate expert at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who helped draft parts of the report.

An article in today's Washington Post describes how the US as well as Chinese officials were effective in softening much of the language directed their way. One sentence in particular saying that "Mitigation measures will...be required," to cope with climate change did not appear in the final draft.

One angle the report attempted to examine was the disparity between the countries responsible for the bulk of pollution versus those who will be most impacted by it. "It's the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit," said Rajendra Pachauri, who is chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But in spite of the attention paid to global warming's economic dimensions, many scientists argue that the lightening of some of the language in the final draft of the report signifies a desire to ease pressure on rich industralized nations to cut emissions of greenhouse gases.

While receiving stern criticism from some climate change experts, the report offered what the Los Angeles Times described as a "near-apocalyptic" assessment of global warming's possibilities, which could indlude "Hundreds of millions of people short of water, extreme food shortages in Africa, a landscape ravaged by floods and millions of species sentenced to extinction."

Link to article on Raw Story.com