Leaked report says climate scientists now see higher projected temperatures.

* Leaked report says climate scientists now see higher projected temperatures: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made two momentous revisions in its forecasts of global warming, according to a summary report that was distributed to the world's governments--and quickly leaked to reporters--in October. The panel has substantially raised its projections of the Earth's likely temperature increases over the next century, and it has become sharply more emphatic in its conclusion that human activities (as opposed to natural planetary cycles) are driving the increase. The IPCC, a U.N.-administered body composed of leading climate scientists from more than 100 nations, issued its first report projecting global warming and imputing anthropogenic (human) causality in 1992, and a second, stronger, report in 1995.

In its 1995 forecasts of temperature increase, the IPCC projected that the planet will warm by 1.8 to 6.3 degrees F. during the next century, but the new report revises that projection upward, to a range of 2.7 to 11 degrees. The revision is based on new evidence about the effects of sulfate pollution from factories and power plants. Sulfates have a cooling effect, which to some extent offsets the warming effect of the carbon dioxide blanket now forming over the planet. Because sulfate emissions are expected to be reduced substantially in the coming years as a result of efforts to mitigate other environmental effects (such as acid rain), that offsetting effect will be reduced--and temperature increases will likely escalate.

The full IPCC report will be officially issued later this year, and some of the final wording could be revised. The leaked summary, however, has already begun to focus media attention on the real magnitude of the climate disruption issue. In an October 28, 2000 editorial, the New York Times averred that in the U.S. Congress (where the Senate has so far refused to ratify the climate treaty), "all but a few members have adopted an ostrich-like attitude toward global warming, and the Republican leadership has shown only contempt for the Kyoto accord." The editorial concludes with an observation that the United States will likely fail to embark on a national program to reduce global warming emissions as long as the Congress "persists in a policy of reckless inaction."