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Report: Warming to slash food supply

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published April 11, 2007

MEXICO CITY - Rising global temperatures could melt Latin America's glaciers within 15 years, cause food shortages affecting 130-million people across Asia by 2050 and wipe out Africa's wheat crop, according to a U.N. report released Tuesday.

The report, written and reviewed by hundreds of scientists, outlined dramatic effects of climate change including rising sea levels, the disappearance of species and intensifying natural disasters. It said 30 percent of the world's coastlines could be lost by 2080.

Scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change outlined details of the report in news conferences around the world Tuesday, four days after they released a written summary of their findings. The report is the second of three being issued this year; the first dealt with the physical science of climate change and the third will deal with responses to it.

In Mexico City, scientists predicted that global warming could cost the Brazilian rain forest up to 30 percent of its species and turn large swaths into savannah. They said ocean levels are projected to rise 4.3 feet by 2080 and flood low-lying cities including Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires.

Polar ice caps will likely melt, opening a waterway at the North Pole and threatening to make the Panama Canal obsolete, IPCC member Edmundo de Alba said. Warmer waters will spawn bigger and more dangerous hurricanes that will threaten coastlines not usually affected by them.

Latin America's diverse ecosystems will struggle with intense droughts and flooding, and as many as 70-million people in the region will be left without enough water, according to the report.

"What's clear is places suffering from drought are going to become drier, and places with a large amount of precipitation are going to see an increase in precipitation," de Alba said.

In North America, Chicago and Los Angeles are likely to face increasing heat waves. New York and Boston could face severe storm surges. North America's wood and timber producers may suffer up to $2-billion in losses a year, and U.S. and Canadian cities that rely on melting snow for water are likely to face severe shortages.

The impact will be felt from Florida and Texas to Alaska and Canada's Northwest Territories, the panel said.

"Canada and the United States are, despite being strong economies with the financial power to cope, facing many of the same impacts that are projected for the rest of the world," Achim Steiner, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, which co-founded the panel, said in a statement.

The report said Africa is most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Fast Facts:

U.S. coast-to-coast chaos predicted

- Just over 40 percent of the water supply to southern California is likely to be vulnerable by the 2020s due to losses of the Sierra Nevada and Colorado River basin snow packs.

- Near the end of the 21st century, under a strong warming scenario, the current one-in-100-years flood in New York could have a return period of three to four years.

[Last modified April 11, 2007, 02:29:22]