A malnourished Somali child from southern Somalia stands in front of a makeshift shelter in Mogadishu, Somalia. Starvation, poverty, flooding, heat waves, droughts, war and disease already lead to human tragedies. They're likely to worsen as the world warms from man-made climate change, a leaked draft of an international scientific report forecasts. — AP Alister Doyle OSLO — Global warming poses a mounting threat to health, economic growth, crops and water supplies, according to a draft report by top scientists that puts unprecedented emphasis on the risks of a changing climate. A leaked 29-page draft by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), about the impacts of rising temperatures and due for release in March 2014, mentions “risk” 139 times against just 41 in its last assessment in 2007. The increased stress on risk may make the case for cutting greenhouse gas emissions clearer both to policymakers and the public by making it sound like an insurance policy for the planet, analysts say. Many governments, meeting in Warsaw from Nov. 11-22 for UN talks on climate change, have long pleaded for greater scientific certainty before making billion-dollar investments in everything from flood barriers to renewable energies. But certainty is elusive in climate science, as it is in predicting anything from the weather to Wall Street. “The IPCC has transitioned to what I consider to be a full and rich recognition that the climate change problem is about managing risk,” Christopher Field, co-chair of the IPCC group preparing the report, told Reuters. The report, posted on a climate sceptical website “nofrakkingconsensus” on Nov. 1, resembles a previous draft that warns that parts of society and nature are more vulnerable than expected to climate change. Field, a professor at Stanford University, also said there was more certainty about many aspects of climate change than in 2007. He cautioned the draft was subject to change in editing. It says, for instance, that a rise of temperatures of more than 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times could lead to economic losses of between 0.2 and 2.0 percent of global income. It also says that warming will exacerbate threats to health, damage yields of major crops in many areas and lead to more floods. It could also exacerbate poverty and economic shocks that are root causes of violent conflicts. “Responding to climate-related risks involves making decisions and taking actions in the face of continuing uncertainty about the extent of climate change and the severity of impacts in a changing world,” the draft says. The panel's credibility is under extra scrutiny, for its last report in 2007 wrongly exaggerated the melt of Himalayan glaciers. Several reviews said that this error, however, did not undermine the key findings in 2007. — Reuters
