Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Climate experts urge immediate action to offset impact of global warming

Governments and consumers in the United States and worldwide should take immediate steps to reduce the threat of global warming and to prepare for a future in which coastal flooding, reduced crop yields and elevated rates of climate-related illness are all but certain, top U.S. scientists said Tuesday.

At a meeting organized by AAAS and its journal, Science, the climate researchers argued that while some policy experts and sectors of the public dispute the risk, there is in fact no cause for doubt: The world is significantly warmer today than it was a century ago--and it's getting warmer. Without action now, they warned, the impact could be devastating.

As the Earth warms, ice sheets are melting and sea levels are rising--island and river-delta communities already are vanishing beneath the waves. Native Inuit fishermen are falling through thinning Arctic ice they've traversed many times before. In recent decades, climate change claimed some 150,000 lives in 2000 and sickened many others, especially elderly people and very young children, according to the World Health Organization.

One of the conference experts, Harvard geochemistry Professor Daniel Schrag, likened the situation to...(Full story & features)

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