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Published online 21 November 2007 | Nature 450, 470 (2007) | doi:10.1038/450470b
News in Brief
Climate body's summary urges action on warming
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Please note this is News in Brief, and so will be a short article.
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It is deplorable that a Report of this nature, which apparently calls for widespread economic changes, is not yet available, as it has not been completed. The statements made appear to be based only on a DRAFT of the "Summary for Pollcymakers". None of the Four Volumes of this Report has yet appeared in printed form, and one wonders how many people have gone through the agony of trying to read the first three volumes on the web.
"Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level" from: Summary for Policymakers of the Synthesis Report of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report DRAFT COPY 16 NOVEMBER 2007 23:04 – Subject to final copyedit http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf
Due to the irreversible physical and chemical processes converting biomass to fossils the amount of carbon available in the biosphere is steadily diminishing and, on a geological time scale, it is certain that without human intervention it would eventually lead to critical shortage of carbon available for life on Earth. Human activities are the single most important if not the only mechanism by which carbon and other essential elements are returned to the biosphere. If the fossil records and vast amounts of scientific results derived from them prove anything, they provide irrefutable evidence that maximum production of the essential components of life such as proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids coincided with significantly more carbon in the biosphere than we currently have. Incidentally, with the fossil fuel reserves still untapped we are not even close to reaching the same level of greenhouse gases any time soon that may have existed when the production of biomass was at its peak. With respect to the human perspective, the existing population density around the world and the current trend of voluntary migration of people (to e.g. Florida, Arizona, California, Costa Rica, Mexico, etc.) are a resounding testimony of our preference for warmer climate. On the other hand, should the trend ever be reversed due to global warming, increasing temperatures would open up vast territories of Canada, Europe and Siberia for agriculture as well as industrial development, that currently are sparsely populated due to the climate too cold to be attractive for the general population. So, instead of the counterproductive rhetoric and posturing about postulated changes such as “global warming� now or “nuclear winter� of the 1980s, would it not be much more in line with time-tested human traditions to trust our ability to turn whatever situation may occur to our advantage?