UN climate report: already out of date?

PARIS: Fresh from winning the Nobel Peace Prize, the UN's top scientific panel on climate change will meet in the Spanish port city of Valencia tomorrow to finalise a landmark report on global warming and how to avoid its worst ravages.

But beneath its newly-won fame, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is under intensifying scrutiny about some of its key processes.

Some voices, including from within the IPCC itself, fear the panel's grand report will be badly out of date before it is even printed. Others quietly criticise the organisation as being too conservative in its appreciation of the climate threat.

The document to be issued in Valencia next Friday boils down a 2,500-page, three-volume assessment issued earlier this year, the first IPCC review of climate change since 2001.

The upcoming "synthesis report," comprising a summary for policymakers of 25 pages, and a technical document of around 70 pages, puts in a nutshell the evidence for climate change, its likely impacts and the options for tackling it.

The analysis carries huge political weight. It will be a compass for guiding action on climate change for years to come, starting with a crucial UN conference in Bali next month.

But some experts are worried, fearing that the IPCC's ponderous machinery, which gives birth to a new review only every five or six years, is falling dangerously behind with what's happening to Earth's climate systems.