Global warming: people to blame, but can be fixed

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO (Reuters) - Global warming is already happening and people are very likely to blame. Impacts will range from disruptions to catastrophes, but the problem can still be fixed without derailing the world economy.

Those are likely to be the conclusions in a five-page U.N. summary in November boiling down more than 3,000 pages of science in three authoritative reports about global warming already issued this year, say experts involved.

The last report, on costs, was issued in Bangkok on Friday.

"It's difficult to put it all into one crisp sentence," said Coleen Vogel of the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, one of 32 authors of the synthesis report to be issued in Valencia, Spain.

"Almost nobody will have read all three volumes," said Bettina Menne of the World Health Organisation, another author.

"So this is really where you put everything on the table," she said of a summary meant to tie together knowledge about how burning fossil fuels releases heat-trapping gases, feared impacts such as floods or droughts and costs of action.

The five-page report, and a longer 30-page summary, is likely to be the most read by government policy makers trying to work out ways to step up a fight against climate change beyond 2012 when a first period of the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol runs out.

But deciding what stays and what gets cut out of the concise versions will be tough.