Climate Change Discussion

[Francois Cellier]

I decided to open a new thread on climate change, similar to the one on peak oil. Please, collect your climate change articles here to keep them together in one place and hopefully provide a more coherent picture of what is going on.

[Francois Cellier]

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1078690979969_108/?hub=SciTech

World grain shortage in two years, expert warns
Canadian Press


OTTAWA — The world is on the verge of a grain shortage that will destabilize poor countries, drive up food prices and send financial markets reeling, says a leading U.S. environmental thinker.

Lester Brown, founder of the Washington, D.C.-based Earth Policy Institute, predicts climate change and depletion of freshwater aquifers around the world will result in a global food crisis within two years.

"I've been saying for some years now that if the environmental trends of recent decades continue we'll eventually be in trouble," said Brown, interviewed during a visit to Ottawa last week.

"What was not clear was what form the trouble would first take, and when. I now think it's going to come on the food front and within the next two years."

Brown, the author of numerous books and winner of many awards, has been described by the Washington Post as "one of the world's most influential thinkers."

He says global grain production has been flat for the last eight years and has fallen short of demand for the last four years. China's grain production last year was 70 million tonnes below demand -- a shortfall equal to Canada's total grain harvest.

Chinese farmers are pumping too much water from underground aquifers, reducing the water available for irrigation, he said. Meanwhile, temperatures are rising due to the greenhouse effect, reducing crop yields.

For every one-degree rise in average temperatures during the growing season there is a 10-per-cent decline in yields, says Brown.

By next year China will be forced to purchase massively from a global market where stocks are already at a 30-year low, causing prices to soar, Brown predicts. Grain is a key input in bread, meat and dairy products.

"At the international level, higher food prices . . . could lead to political instability in a lot of low-income countries that import substantial amounts of grain," said Brown.

"That political instability could occur on a scale that would disrupt global economic progress. At that point we may realize that the environmental trends that we've been neglecting in recent decades are going to have to be addressed."

Brazil's agricultural production has been rising sharply in recent years, but Brown doubts that can be sustained and says it won't offset trends in other regions.

He said the fastest-growing wheat markets in recent years have been North Africa and the Middle East, where virtually every country is running up against the limit of water supplies. It takes a thousand tonnes of water to produce a tonne of grain, he says.

"To satisfy the growing needs of the cities, they take irrigation water from agriculture and then they import grain to offset that loss of production.

"The water required to produce the grain imported into that region last year is equal to the annual flow of the Nile River.

"What's happening in fact is that the competition for water is beginning to take place in grain markets. Grain has become the currency with which countries balance their water budgets."

Brown said he believes that soaring food prices could translate into powerful pressure for action to curb greenhouse emissions.

"If it becomes apparent that rising temperatures are shrinking harvests in more and more places in the world, and driving up food prices, then suddenly there will be a powerful new lobby for cutting carbon emissions -- consumers.

"The whole ball game could change very quickly."

Brown concedes that his analysis is not shared by the agricultural establishment, and certainly not by the Chinese government which has strenuously rejected his views.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the U.S. Department of Agriculture both project China's grain production will keep growing.

"They can't seem to accept that grain production in a major grain-producing country could actually turn down and keep going down, because it's outside their realm of experience," said Brown.

"They don't understand hydrology, it's amazing."

Are there signs of hope?

"You never know. Leaders and societies will respond. Sometimes in a crisis situation you have a Nero, sometimes you have a Churchill, you never can be sure.

"What I'm trying to do is get these issues on the table."

[Francois Cellier]

This was already on "World Events," but I wanted to preserve it on this thread as well.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=499013

Scientist 'gagged' by No 10 after warning of global warming threatBy Steve Connor and Andrew Grice
08 March 2004


Downing Street tried to muzzle the Government's top scientific adviser after he warned that global warming was a more serious threat than international terrorism.

Ivan Rogers, Mr Blair's principal private secretary, told Sir David King, the Prime Minister's chief scientist, to limit his contact with the media after he made outspoken comments about President George Bush's policy on climate change.

In January, Sir David wrote a scathing article in the American journal Science attacking Washington for failing to take climate change seriously. "In my view, climate change is the most severe problem we are facing today, more serious even than the threat of terrorism," he wrote.

Support for Sir David's view came yesterday from Hans Blix, the former United Nations chief weapons inspector, who said the environment was at least as important a threat as global terrorism. He told BBC1's Breakfast with Frost: "I think we still overestimate the danger of terror. There are other things that are of equal, if not greater, magnitude, like the environmental global risks."

Since Sir David's article in Science was published, No 10 has tried to limit the damage to Anglo-American relations by reining in the Prime Minister's chief scientist.

In a leaked memo, Mr Rogers ordered Sir David - a Cambridge University chemist who offers independent advice to ministers - to decline any interview requests from British and American newspapers and BBC Radio 4's Today .

"To accept such bids runs the risk of turning the debate into a sterile argument about whether or not climate change is a greater risk," Mr Rogers said in the memo, which was sent to Sir David's office in February. "This sort of discussion does not help us achieve our wider policy aims ahead of our G8 presidency [next year]." The move will be seized on by critics of Mr Blair's stance over the Iraq war as further evidence that he is too subservient to the Bush administration. It will also be seen as an attempt to bolster the Prime Minister's case for pre-emptive strikes to combat the threat of international terrorism, which he outlined in a speech on Friday.

Sir David, who is highly regarded by Mr Blair, has been primed with a list of 136 mock questions that the media could ask if they were able to get access to him, and the suggested answers he should be prepared to give. One question asks: "How do the number of deaths caused by climate change and terrorism compare?" The stated answer that Sir David is expected to give says: "The value of any comparison would be highly questionable - we are talking about threats that are intrinsically different."

If Sir David were to find himself pushed to decide whether terrorism or climate change was the greater threat, he was supposed to answer: "Both are serious and immediate problems for the world today." But this was not what Sir David said on the Today programme on 9 January when the Science article was published.

Asked to explain how he had come to the conclusion that global warming was more serious than terrorism, Sir David replied that his equation was "based on the number of fatalities that have already occurred" - implying that global warming has already killed more people than terrorism.

The leaked memo came to light after a computer disk was discovered by an American freelance journalist, Mike Martin, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle, where Sir David gave a lecture.

"The disk was lying on the top of a computer in the press room and I popped it into the machine to see what was on it," said Mr Martin, whose own article is published on the ScienceNow website, an online service operated by Science.

Mr Rogers' memo, written a few days before the Seattle conference, was aimed at limiting his exposure to questions from US and British media. While in Seattle, Sir David sat on a panel of scientists at one carefully stage-managed press conference, but his press office said he was too busy to give interviews afterwards to journalists.

Lucy Brunt-Jenner, Sir David's press officer, said she could not comment on internal government documents but said it would be wrong to suggest that Sir David was in any way muzzled. "Sir David had a press conference and he was available to the media at three times," Ms Brunt-Jenner said.

But Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrats' environment spokesman, said: "It's a clear attempt by the Prime Minister to keep Sir David quiet. The Government's chief scientist is the nation's chief scientist and I'd expect him to say what he thinks."

[Fredfredson]

http://www.exploratorium.edu/climate/primer/

From the introduction:

You can think of this web site as a window into the world of scientific research. In this primer, you’ll find a general discussion of the physical processes underlying the earth’s climate, an outline of the kinds of data that may shed light on how the climate is changing—and the role of human activity in these changes —and a description of some of the questions and uncertainties that researchers continue to explore. This primer is organized into four interconnected sections: the Atmosphere; the Hydrosphere (the earth’s oceans and water); the Cryosphere (the areas of the planet covered by snow and ice); and the Biosphere (the living organisms inhabiting all these domains).




Enjoy
F

[Fredfredson]

http://unfccc.int/resource/iuckit/foreword.html
http://unfccc.int/resource/iuckit/fact01.html

From the forward:


Foreword



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


When the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization launched the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, few people anticipated just how effective and influential its work would become.

Everyone agrees that environmental policy must be based on sound science. Prudent policy choices must be rooted in rigorous, careful and balanced analyses of the best scientific and technical information.

The IPCC has shown the way, developing a process that engages hundreds of the world’s leading experts in reviewing the most up-to-date, peer-reviewed literature on the scientific and technical aspects of climate change. The IPCC integrates its assessments into a policy-relevant format universally accepted as a basis for decision-making by the 185 member governments of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The IPCC’s three-volume Third Assessment Report was finalized in early 2001. Its message is clear: intensive climate research and monitoring gives scientists much greater confidence in their understanding of the causes and consequences of global warming. The Assessment presents a compelling snapshot of what the earth will probably look like in the late 21st century, when a global warming of 1.4 – 5.8˚C (2.5 – 10.4˚F) will influence weather patterns, water resources, the cycling of the seasons, ecosystems, extreme climate events, and much more. Even greater changes are expected in the more distant future.

The international community is working together to minimize these risks through the 1992 Convention and its 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Undoubtedly the most complex and ambitious agreements on environment and sustainable development ever adopted, the climate change treaties set out the principles, institutions, and rules for addressing global warming. They establish a regime that is dynamic and action-oriented. At the same time, it is flexible enough to evolve over the coming decades in response to changes in the political landscape and in scientific understanding.

With this global process now in place, governments need to move forward quickly to design and carry out their national climate change policies. The IPCC Assessment confirms that well-designed, market-oriented policies can reduce emissions and the costs of adapting to the unavoidable impacts of climate change while simultaneously generating significant economic benefits. These benefits include more cost-effective energy systems, more rapid technological innovation, reduced expenditures on inappropriate subsidies, and more efficient markets. Cutting emissions can also reduce damage from local environmental problems, including the health effects of air pollution.

The IPCC and the Climate Change Convention both demonstrate that the peoples of the world can tackle global problems together by collaborating through the United Nations system. The fact sheets in this information kit seek to summarize in simple language the most up-to-date findings of the IPCC and the most recent developments under the Convention and Protocol. We hope you find them useful in your own work.


Klaus Töpfer
Executive Director
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Joke Waller Hunter
Executive Secretary
Climate Change Secretariat



An excellant summary of the findings and terms of the IPCC.

F

[Fredfredson]

Applicable to much of Science.
F
====================
http://www.robbert.ca/gsc/index.html

Quotations.

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The philosophical and conceptual base of the The Global systems Centre approach to modeling is reflected in extraordinarily powerful and concise language of the following set of quotations. Enjoy!

On the Use of Models in Science
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.
- John Von Neumann

On Computer Modelling
Computer models do not make the job of decision making any easier.
They make it harder.
They enforce rigourous thinking and expose fallacies in mental models we have always been proud of.
We think it is worth it.
We think it pushes our mental models to be a bit closer to reflecting the world as it is.
- Donella Meadows, Groping in the Dark: the First Decade of Global Modelling

On Statistics
Of course, the entire effort is to put oneself.
Outside the ordinary range
Of what are called statistics.
- Stephen Spender

On the Future
Trying to sharpen one's sense of the future is useless, as the future has no existence; trying to see the present as an interim in which anything may go at any time merely adds to the mood of destruction. Not everything that can happen will happen: we have to understand what kind of people we are before we can begin to guess what we shall do. What kind of people we are is perhaps determined, and certainly conditioned, by what we realize of the past, and sharpening our sense of the past is the only way of meeting the future.
- Northrope Frye, Divisions on a Ground, 1982

On Stocks and Flows
Another taxonomic and conceptual problem that has plagued economics from the time of Adam Smith is the confusion between stocks and flows . . . The capital stock is a population of items, production is births into that population, consumption is deaths . . . Furthermore , the idea that production is consumption is only partly true. What we get satisfaction from for the most part is use, not consumption . . . This has led to . . . the absurd view that it is income which is the only measure of riches.
- Kenneth Boulding, Ecodynamics,1978

On Process as a Primal Concept
(The concept of) process is primary . . . every structure we observe is a manifestation of an underlying process.
- Fritjof Capra, "Criteria of Systems Thinking" 1985

On Time in Complex systems
Interactions among component processes take the form of causal chains that may be complex. The representation of time structure is essential. When sequences of cause and effect become circular, then the mapping of those sequences onto timeless logic becomes self-contradictory or paradoxical.
- Gregory Bateson Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

On the Economy as a Structure in Space-Time
Equilibrium has become a kind of holy sacrament in economics and has seriously diverted attention from the real world of Heraclitean flux . . . The economic system is a structure in space-time. Consequently, it is evolutionary, subject to constant and irreversible change.
- Kenneth Boulding

On Evolutionary Systems
The evolutionary paradigm challenges concepts of equilibrium and determinacy in scientific theories; and it modifies the classical deterministic conception of scientific laws. The laws conceptualized in the evolutionary context are not deterministic and prescriptive: they do not uniquely determine the coarse of evolution. Rather, they state ensembles of possibilities within which evolutionary processes can unfold.
- Erwin Laszlo Evolution, the Grand Synthesis

On Controlability
Now there is a proven cybernetic theorem which says that the regulation that the regulator can achieve is only as good as the model of the reality that it contains. . . It comes down to this: we cannot regulate our interaction with any aspect of reality that our model of reality does not include - whether as to its theoretical range or as to its observational facilities and resolution - because we cannot by definition be conscious of it.
- Stafford Beer I Said, You are Gods

On Learning and Consciousness
No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it. We must learn to see the world anew.
- Albert Einstein

[Fredfredson]

2003 summer hottest in 500 years

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3536819.stm

Thousands of deaths were blamed on the heatwave
European researchers say last summer was the hottest on the continent for at least five centuries.
"When you consider Europe as a whole, it was by far the hottest," said Juerg Luterbacher of the University of Bern, Switzerland.

According to the study, published by this week's Science magazine, European winters are also getting warmer.

Average winter and annual temperatures during the past three decades were the warmest for 500 years, it says.

Mr Luterbacher and his team collected data from all over Europe to analyse the continent's temperature history.

"We don't make any analysis of the human influence... We only report what we find

Climatologist Juerg Luterbacher
Their information included readings from tree rings and soil cores from the year 1500.

According to their study, there have been weather trends in both ways - towards cool and hot - in the last five centuries.

The second hottest summer in the period was in 1757, which was followed by a cooler spell.

Coolest summer

The year 1902 witnessed the coolest summer of the last 500 years.

Researchers report "an exceptionally strong, unprecedented warming trend" since 1977, resulting in last summer's heatwave.

Authorities in various European countries say thousands of people died last summer due to excess heat.

The Swiss study does not cover the controversial subject of human influence on climate change.

"We don't make any analysis of the human influence," Mr Luterbacher said.

"We don't attempt to determine the cause. We only report what we find."

[Francois Cellier]

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/9567967?source=Evening%20Standad

'We face climate disaster'
By Ben Leapman, Evening Standard Political Reporter
10 March 2004


The Government's chief scientist today set out an "apocalyptic vision" of global warming bringing back the conditions which drove the dinosaurs to extinction.

Professor Sir David King told a House of Lords committee that urgent action was needed "within the next few years" to avert the threat of sudden and severe climate change.

He claimed that last summer's heatwave was a man-made event and a warning sign of worse to come.

And he defied Downing Street by repeating his charges that global warming is a bigger threat than terrorism, and that Washington is failing to tackle the problem.

On a recent trip to America to talk about the threat of global warming, Sir David was warned by Downing Street to limit his contact with the media.

A memo from a No10 aide was leaked to a journalist in Seattle, where the scientist was delivering a lecture.

Today, Sir David told the peers that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was probably the highest it had been for 65 million years, since the Palaeocene epoch when most dinosaurs became extinct.

He said the era saw a "massive reduction" in life on earth and added: "The Antarctic was the best place to be at that time. The rest of the world was virtually uninhabitable."

He also delivered a thinly-veiled attack on President George Bush by praising the effort which individual American states were making to curb their carbon dioxide emissions, in the absence of a ruling from Washington.

And he accused American oil giant Exxon of funding lobbyists who are trying to undermine the consensus on global warming by suggesting that scientists are divided on the nature of the problem.

Sir David said: "This is the biggest issue for us to face this century.

"It's man-made. The science is done. It's complete. It's a matter of political understanding. I personally have little doubt that unfortunately, as time moves on, the global warming events such as the very high temperatures in Europe over the past summer and the flooding two years before will occur more frequently, and the understanding of what's driving these will become more apparent.

"And I think nations across the world will understand... that action has to be taken."

In the past few centuries, carbon dioxide in the air has risen from 270 to 370 parts per million and is still on the increase, Sir David said.

He predicted that if the level reached 550 parts per million, the polar ice caps would melt and the Gulf Stream current would be reversed, plunging Europe into a new ice age while the rest of the globe overheated.

To avoid that threat, he said, the level needed to be stabilised at 450 parts per million.

[Fredfredson]

California Bakes in Record Heat
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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&e=9&u=/ap/california_heat

By MASON STOCKSTILL, Associated Press Writer

LOS ANGELES - Winter doesn't even give way to spring until March 20, but California baked in summerlike heat Monday as temperatures soared to record highs.

Downtown Los Angeles, with mountains to the east still capped in snow from a storm last week, topped out at 93 degrees, 24 above normal. That broke the 1996 record of 89 for March 8, the National Weather Service said.

A 112-year-old mark fell in downtown San Francisco when the temperature hit 82, besting the record of 78 set in 1892. Sacramento tied its 1953 record for the date with a high of 80.

They were among dozens of locations up and down the state reporting highs at record levels. San Diego missed tying its record by one degree but at 84 was 18 degrees above normal.

High pressure created a warming Santa Ana wind condition and summerlike weather as offshore air flow out of the northeast pushed back the cooling ocean influence.

At Los Angeles' Venice Beach, few gathered on the hot sand but plenty of people bicycled and skated on the boardwalk.

"I wouldn't usually come out here, but it's such a nice day," said Billy Bomb, a guitarist performing for passers-by.

To the east at Big Bear Mountain Resorts in the San Bernardino Mountains, skiers hit the slopes as midmorning temperatures hovered in the 50s.

"It's warm. We've got packed snow in the morning, but it's softening as the day goes on," said Brad Farmer, public relations director.

An increasing sea breeze Tuesday was forecast to bring temperatures down by 7 to 10 degrees.

[Fredfredson]

Global warming has gone to the bogs

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0311/p17s01-sten.html

By Robert C. Cowen

Forget the melting glaciers. Global warming is revealing itself in subtler ways. Think methane. Swedish bogs are releasing more methane as climate warms and permafrost melts. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas with 25 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide (CO2). With more methane in the air, climate warming could accelerate.
Meanwhile, just as global warming theory predicts, the atmosphere's highest layers are getting colder and thinner. Contrary to expectations, high atmospheric cooling is the way greenhouse gases, such as CO2 and methane, interact with infrared (heat) radiation. At low altitudes, they absorb heat coming up from below and radiate some back downward.


But where astronauts live, these gases release most of their heat out into space, which cools the higher altitudes. The outer atmosphere contracts as it cools, thinning out its density.

Satellites orbiting a few hundred miles out would feel less drag as the air through which they travel becomes thinner.

That's how John Emmert and colleagues with the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington found evidence that this long-expected global warming effect is under way.

They report in the Journal of Geophysical Research that 30 years of tracking data for 27 satellites and space junk show a steady decline in outer atmospheric density.

That's good news for satellite owners who can use less rocket fuel to keep their birds aloft. The news from Sweden is more troubling.

Bacteria in wetlands release methane as they break down organic matter. It's the marsh gas that sometimes ignites to make spooky lights in the night. This activity slows down when bogs freeze.

Northern peat bogs - especially in subarctic Eurasia - are major sources of methane, which spreads throughout the world. Scientists have wondered what will happen as permafrost continues to melt and bogs become even more biologically active.

An international research team recently provided a window into that future. The group, led by Torben Christensen and colleagues at Lund University's GeoBiosphere Science Center in Sweden, studied 30 years of changes in Sweden's Abisko region. Their results, published in Geophysical Research Letters, show Sweden's sub-arctic bogs are losing permafrost rapidly. It's completely gone in some areas. And Dr. Christensen says that, at the Stordalen site, methane emission is up "at least 20 percent, but maybe as much as 60 percent, from 1970 to 2000."

His team report warns that if its findings are typical of the northern subarctic, global warming could accelerate as bogs thaw.

Laurence Smith at the University of California at Los Angeles and colleagues with a joint Russian-American research team expressed a similar concern last January in Nature.

Their studies of vast peat lands in Siberia show the bogs currently absorb a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere while releasing methane. But this could change. If global warming continues, the researchers warn that chemical and biological activity in the bogs could break down organic matter that now stores CO2, releasing a major new source of the gas back into the atmosphere.

The bottom line is that we have to pay attention to subtle effects. We're not going to be drowned by melting glaciers, but we might be bitten by what's sneaking up on us.

[Francois Cellier]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=519717

Lima forced to ration water due to drought
By Sam Ingleby
10 May 2004


Peru has been forced to ration water to its capital, Lima, after one of the worst droughts to hit the South American country in a decade. The government has imposed restrictions on water use between 5pm and 5am, leaving millions of people in the coastal city without water supplies every night. The restrictions are likely to last throughout Peru's winter.

The city's eight million occupants get their water from the Andes mountains over 160km (100 miles) away. This year, exceptionally low rainfall in the Andes has caused the state-run water company, Sedapal, to restrict the city's supplies. The Sedapal president, Jorge Villacorta, said water levels in the high altitude reservoirs had fallen to 165 million cubic metres, 120 million less than in a normal year.

Mr Villacorta said problems are not just limited to low rainfall. Sedapal loses 38 per cent of its supplies through what it calls "non revenue" means - leakage and theft.

People in Lima use twice as much water as the World Health Organisation deems necessary for personal use, he said. "People need to lose less and leak less water in their houses.

The worst affects of the water shortage are likely to be avoided by the five million people in Lima who can afford cisterns and tanks. At night, when demand for water is at its lowest, they will still have an uninterrupted supply of water. However, as many as three million people, most of them poor, do not have tanks. They will be without water for 12 hours at a time.

[Francois Cellier]

http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=4955867

Fast Arctic thaw portends global warming
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
May 24, 2004 6:15 PM


OSLO (Reuters) - Global warming is hitting the Arctic more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet in what may be a portent of wider, catastrophic changes, the chairman of an eight-nation study has said.

Inuit hunters are falling more frequently through the thinning ice with habitats for plants and animals also disrupted. The icy Hudson Bay in Canada could be uninhabitable for polar bears within just 20 years.

The melting is also destabilising buildings on permafrost and threatening an oil pipeline laid across Alaska.

Benefits, for human commerce, might accrue from the opening up of a now largely icebound short-cut sea route from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Russia might also win easier access to oil and gas as the icecap shrinks and permafrost retreats.

The broader consequences are however disturbing.

"There is dramatic climate change happening in the Arctic right now...about 2-3 times the pace of the whole globe," said Robert Corell, chairman of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), in an 1,800 page report to be handed to ministers in Iceland in November.

"If you want to know what the rest of the planet is going to see in next generation, watch out for the Arctic in the next 5-10 years," he told Reuters on Monday. The report combines input from scientists, indigenous peoples and eight Arctic rim nations.

The Arctic reacts most to global warming, blamed largely on emissions of gases like carbon dioxide from fossil fuels in cars and factories, partly because dark-coloured water or earth, once exposed, soaks up heat far faster than white ice or snow.

Some parts of Alaska have heated up 10 times more than the global average, said Corell, a senior fellow at the American Meteorological Society. Future temperature rises in the Arctic were likely to be twice the 1.4-5.8 Celsius (3-11 F) gain by 2100 forecast by a U.N.-led panel of scientists, he said.


KYOTO?

"I think it (climate change) can be stopped but we will need an aggressive response," Corell said. Global climate change may bring everything from disastrous floods or droughts to a rise in global sea levels that could swamp low-lying Pacific islands.

But environmentalists doubt that governments will decide strong action based on the ACIA report because the United States has pulled out of the U.N.'s Kyoto protocol, the main international scheme to tackle climate change.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that he favoured ratifying Kyoto, which has already been backed by the other six Arctic rim nations -- Canada, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Iceland and Denmark.

"The (ACIA) report underlines how critical it is that we take action as soon as possible, first under Kyoto, to reduce emissions and invest in renewable energy," said Samantha Smith, director of the Arctic Programme at the WWF environmental group.

Among signs of change in the Nordic region, birch trees were taking over traditional reindeer lichen pastures, Corell said. The reindeer had to compete with elk and red deer moving north.

Corell said that the sea route between the Pacific and the Atlantic via the Arctic could open far earlier than expected by most previous studies, cutting shipping times compared to routes via the Suez or Panama canals.