Temperatures Climb as Warming Talks Stall
U.N. Climate Conference Ends Without U.S. Commitment
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP
NEW YORK (Dec. 19) - In the high Arctic, deep in the Atlantic, on Africa's
sunbaked plains, climate scientists are seeing change unfold before their eyes.
In the global councils of power, however, change in climate policy is coming
only slowly.


In Geneva on Thursday, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported
that 2005 thus far is the second warmest year on record, extending a trend
climatologists attribute at least partly to heat-trapping "greenhouse gases"
accumulating in the atmosphere.


In New York, NASA's Goddard Institute projected that 2005 will surpass 1998
to end as the hottest year globally in the 125 years since reliable records
have been kept. It said warming has accelerated and is now boosting the mercury
every decade by more than 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit.


"The observed rapid warming thus gives urgency to discussions about how to
slow greenhouse gas emissions," the NASA researchers said.


Five days earlier in Montreal, however, the annual 189-nation U.N. climate
conference ended two weeks of such discussions by failing once again to win U.S.
commitments to reduce greenhouse emissions -- as almost all other
industrialized nations are committed to do by 2012 under the Kyoto Protocol.


The Montreal delegates did adopt technical rules for that 1997 agreement,
leading Canadian conference president Stephane Dion to declare, "The Kyoto
Protocol has been switched on." And the 157 Kyoto Protocol nations agreed to
negotiate further emissions reductions for the post-2012 period.


But Kyoto's first-phase, country-by-country targets are modest and may not
all be met; there's no guarantee the second-phase negotiations will produce
deeper cuts, and the United States, the biggest greenhouse emitter, remains an
outsider.


Carbon dioxide, most important of six greenhouse gases covered by Kyoto, is a
byproduct of automobile engines, power plants and other fossil fuel-burning
industries.


The atmosphere now holds more than one-third more carbon dioxide than it did
before the Industrial Revolution. In fact, European scientists reported last
month that analysis of ice cores from Antarctica shows that today's level is 27
percent higher than any previous peak looking back 650,000 years.


A U.N.-organized network of scientists warns of shifting climate zones, ocean
levels rising via heat expansion and glacial melting, and more extreme
weather events if emissions are not reined in and average temperatures continue to
rise.


Among fresh reports of warming's impact:


The WMO said Thursday that in the Arctic Sea, where average winter
temperatures have risen as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit over 50 years, the ice cap this
summer was 20 percent smaller than the 1979-2004 average.


British oceanographers reported this month that Atlantic currents carrying
warm water toward northern Europe have slowed. Freshwater from melting northern
ice caps and glaciers is believed interfering with saltwater currents.
Ultimately such a change could cool the European climate.


In southern Africa, beset by four years of drought, average temperatures
during the 12-month period ending last July were the warmest on record, British
scientists said. The mercury stood more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit above a recent
40-year average.


In Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea in the southwest Pacific, rising seas are
forcing hundreds of islanders to abandon vulnerable coastal homes for higher
ground, according to U.N. and news reports.


A small, vocal minority of climate skeptics, who long theorized manmade
emissions weren't influencing the climate, has grown quieter as evidence of global
warming and its effects has mounted.


"In a sense, the burden of proof has shifted from the people who are saying
there's a risk, to the skeptics now," Michel Jarraud, WMO secretary-general,
said in an interview.


In Montreal, Bush administration envoys, who once cited scientific
uncertainty in rejecting the Kyoto pact, focused instead on the argument that emissions
controls would damage the U.S. economy.


Largely isolated, the Americans agreed only to joining a nonbinding,
exploratory global "dialogue" on future steps to combat warming.


Those who ratified Kyoto, meanwhile, decided a working group should develop
proposals for emissions reductions by 35 industrialized nations after the
current pact expires in 2012. They didn't agree on a deadline for that work,
however, and made little headway on how to draw China, India and other newly
industrializing countries into the emissions-control regime.


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