UNITED NATIONS - An international panel of scientists presented the United Nations with a sweeping, detailed plan on Tuesday to combat climate change - a challenge, it said, "to which civilization must rise."
Failure would produce a turbulent century of weather extremes, spreading drought and disease, expanding oceans and displaced coastal populations, it said.
"The increasing numbers of environmental refugees as sea levels rise and storm surges increase will be in the tens of millions," panel co-chair Rosina Bierbaum, a University of Michigan ecologist, told reporters.
After a two-year study, the group, representing 11 nations, offered scores of recommendations: from pouring billions more dollars into research and development of cleaner energy sources, to mobilizing U.N. and other agencies to help affected people, to winning political agreement on a global temperature "ceiling."
Their 166-page report, produced at U.N. request and sponsored by the private United Nations Foundation and the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society, was issued just three weeks after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an authoritative U.N. network of 2,000 scientists, released its latest assessment of climate science.
The IPCC expressed its greatest confidence yet that global warming is being caused largely by the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, mostly from man's burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels. If nothing's done, it said, global temperatures could rise as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.
Temperatures rose an average 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 100 years. Tuesday's report said the world's nations should agree to limit further rises this century to no more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
Beyond that, "we would be in a regime where the danger of intolerable and unmanageable impacts on human well-being would rise very rapidly," said panel member John P. Holdren, director of Massachusetts' Woods Hole Research Center.
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