environment shows risks

Global warming is 'very likely' caused by humans and that climate change will continue for centuries even if heat-trapping gases are reduced. Despite the dire outlook, rise in sea level and the most catastrophic storms and droughts can be avoided if prompt action is taken

By 2020, the United States will emit almost one-fifth more gases that lead to global warming than it did in 2000, increasing the risks of drought and scarce water supplies.

The United States already is responsible for one-quarter of the world's carbon dioxide and other 'greenhouse' gases that scientists blame for global warming.

The report, projects that the current administration's climate policy would result in the emission of 9.2 billion tons of greenhouse gases in 2020, a 19 percent increase from 7.7 billion tons in 2000.

According to a UN report, global warming is 'very likely' caused by mankind and that climate change will continue for centuries even if heat-trapping gases are reduced. The report was approved by 113 nations including the United States. Despite the dire outlook, most scientists say, huge sea level rises and the most catastrophic storms and droughts can be avoided if prompt action is taken.

"We're on a path to exceeding levels of global warming that will cause catastrophic consequences, and we really need to be seriously reducing emissions, not just reducing the growth rate as the president is doing," said Michael McCracken, chief scientist at the nonpartisan climate institute in Washington.

Among the consequences of a warming world is 'a distinct reduction in spring snow pack in the northwestern United States,' which supplies much of that regions' water, said Rick Piltz, director of Climate Science Watch, a nonprofit watchdog programme. Final report will evade a full discussion of how global warming might affect the nation.

"I think it is very likely that the main reason the report has been held up for more than a year beyond the deadline is because the administration is reluctant to make an honest statement about likely climate change impacts on this country," said Piltz, a former senior associate with the Federal Climate Change Science Programme.

Shortly after taking office, Bush rejected the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, a UN treaty that was to have required industrial nations to cut global warming gases by 2012 by an average five percent below 1990 levels.

He argued that cutting the US share to below six billion tons a year, as the treaty would have required, would have cost five million US jobs. He objected, too, that such high-polluting developing nations as China and India are not required to reduce emissions.

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