How climate change will affect the world

David Adam

The effects of climate change will be felt sooner than scientists realised and the world must learn to live with the effects, experts said on Tuesday.

Martin Parry, a climate scientist with the United Kingdom’s Met Office, said destructive changes in temperature, rainfall and agriculture were now forecast to occur several decades earlier than thought. Vulnerable people, such as the old and po or, would be the worst affected, and, world leaders had not yet accepted that their countries would have to adapt to the likely consequences.

Speaking at a meeting to launch the full report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the impacts of global warming, Professor Parry, co-chairman of the IPCC working group that wrote the report, said: “We are all used to talking about these impacts coming in the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. Now we know that it’s us.”

He added that politicians had wasted a decade by focussing only on ways to cut emissions, and had only recently woken up to the need to adapt. “Mitigation has got all the attention, but we cannot mitigate out of this problem. We now have a choice between a future with a damaged world or a severely damaged world.”

The international response to the problem has failed to grasp that serious consequences such as reduced crop yields and water shortages were now inevitable, he said. Countries such as Britain needed to focus on helping nations in the developing world cope with the predicted impacts, by helping them to introduce irrigation and water management technology, drought-resistant crops and new building techniques.

R.K. Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, said: “Wheat production in India is already in decline, for no other reason than climate change. Everyone thought we didn’t have to worry about Indian agriculture for several decades. Now we know it’s being affected now.”

The summary chapter of the report was published in April, after arguments between scientists and political officials over its contents. Professor Parry said: “Governments don’t like numbers, so some numbers were brushed out of it.”

The report warned that Africa and the Arctic would bear the brunt of climate impacts, along with small islands such as Fiji, and Asian river megadeltas, including the Mekong. It said extreme weather events were likely to become more intense and more frequent, and the effect on ecosystems could be severe.

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007