Climate report: Mass starvation, drought possible

11 March 2007Chicago Sun-TimesSeth Borenstein

The harmful effects of global warming on daily life are showing up, and within a couple of decades, hundreds of millions of people won't have enough water, top scientists will say next month at a Belgium meeting.

At the same time, tens of millions of others will be flooded out of their homes each year as the Earth reels from rising temperatures and sea levels, according to sections of a draft of an international scientific report obtained by the Associated Press.

Tropical diseases such as malaria will spread. By 2050, polar bears will mostly be found in zoos, their habitats gone. Pests such as fire ants will thrive.

For a time, food will be plentiful because of the longer growing season in northern regions. But by 2080, hundreds of millions of people could starve, says the report, which is still being revised.

The draft by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change focuses on global warming's effects and is the second in a series of four being issued this year. Written and reviewed by more than 1,000 scientists worldwide, it must be edited by government officials. But some scientists said the overall message is not likely to change when it's issued in Brussels, where European Union leaders agreed last week to cut greenhouse gas emissions drastically by 2020. Their plan will be presented to President Bush and other world leaders at a summit in June.

The report offers some hope if nations slow and then reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, but it notes that what's happening now isn't encouraging.

''Changes in climate are now affecting physical and biological systems on every continent,'' the report says, in marked contrast to a 2001 report by the same international group that said the effects of global warming were coming. That report only mentioned scattered regional effects.

''Things are happening and happening faster than we expected,'' said Patricia Romero Lankao of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., one of the many co-authors.

Co-author Terry Root of Stanford University said: ''We truly are standing at the edge of mass extinction'' of species.