NBC News: Global warming is driving humanity toward a whole new level of many risks, a U.N. scientific panel reports, warning that the wild climate ride has only just begun. Disasters such as killer heat waves in Europe, wildfires in the United States, droughts in Australia and deadly flooding in Mozambique, Thailand and Pakistan highlight how vulnerable humanity is to extreme weather, a Nobel Prize-winning group of scientists says in a massive new report released early Monday. The dangers are going to worsen as the climate changes even more, the report's authors say, and no one is immune."We're all sitting ducks," Princeton University professor Michael Oppenheimer, one of the main authors of the 32-volume report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said in an interview.
After several days of late-night wrangling, more than 100 governments unanimously approved the scientist-written 44-page summary — which is aimed at world political leaders. The summary mentions the word "risk" an average of about five times per page. "Changes are occurring rapidly and they are sort of building up that risk," said the overall lead author of the report, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science in California.
These risks are both big and small, according to the report. They are now and in the future. They hit farmers and big cities. Some places will have too much water, some not enough, including drinking water. Other risks mentioned in the report involve theprice and availability of food, and to a lesser and more qualified extent some diseases, financial costs and even world peace.
"Things are worse than we had predicted" in 2007, when the group of scientists last issued this type of report, said report co-author Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University in Bangladesh. "We are going to see more and more impacts, faster and sooner than we had anticipated."....
Canberra bush fires in 2003, public domain
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