CIAO DATE: 03/02

Global Issues

Volume 2, Number 2, April 1997

Preface

If countries around the world do not reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by the end of the next century:

• Temperatures will have increased between 1 and 3.5 degrees Celsius, depending on population and economic growth.
• Sea level will be 15 to 90 centimeters higher than now, with the best estimate being 50 cm, threatening 92 million people each year with floods by the year 2100.
• Mortality and illness will have risen as the intensity and duration of heat waves increased and as the tropical habitat of mosquitoes that carry malaria and dengue fever crept northward.
• Rainfall will have decreased in some tropical and subtropical areas and increased in others, significantly reducing food crops in developing countries as a whole.

The source for these worrying estimates is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of more than 2,000 scientists worldwide.

This issue of Global Issues concentrates on the U.S. proposal to strengthen the current climate change convention by requiring developed countries to reduce greenhouse emissions early in the next century. It also calls on developing countries to make reductions in the future.

Almost all countries would be greatly affected by attempts to reduce greenhouse emissions because they are produced by the burning of the major fuels of a modern economy — coal and oil, which forms carbon dioxide. In developing countries, rotting rice paddies and certain animals give off methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Efforts to revise the current climate change treaty began last year and the contentious talks are scheduled to conclude in December in Kyoto, Japan. Developed countries are divided over how much to cut greenhouse emissions and when. Many oil-producing countries oppose reductions. And many developing countries agree to treaty revisions only if the industrialized nations have to make reductions.