World Heads for Pivotal Climate Talks

NEW YORK -- The latest news from the climate front isn't good.

The Arctic ice cap melted this summer to the greatest extent on record. Scientists say oceans are losing some ability to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide, the chief industrial emission blamed for warming. And the world's power plants, factories, automobiles and jetliners are spewing carbon at a faster rate than anticipated.

The world's nations convene in Indonesia next week at a conference pivotal for drawing rich and poor, northern and southern nations together. The goal is to save the climate that has nurtured man for millennia and head off a scientific forecast of super-hurricanes, collapsing ice sheets and drowning coastlines.

Behind closed doors on the resort island of Bali, that turbulent future will be the backdrop to sessions in which negotiators will tinker with and test language and nuance. Some words -- "commitments," "binding," "voluntary" -- could set off storms of argument by the end of the Dec. 3-14 conference.

Returning last month from an unprecedented trip to a fast-warming corner of icy Antarctica, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon took note of the troubling new data.

"I believe we are on the verge of a catastrophe if we do not act," he said on Nov. 16.

The next day, in Spain, a Nobel Prize-winning U.N. network of scientists issued a capstone report after six years' study, saying carbon and other heat-trapping "greenhouse gas" emissions must stabilize by 2015 and then decline.

Without action, they said, temperatures will rise by degrees and a changing climate will change the world -- via drought, severe weather, rising seas, dying species and other consequences.

The bad news is being heard in Washington, where the Bush administration was once slow to accept the climate science.

"We seek a `Bali road map' that will advance negotiations under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change," Undersecretary of State Paula J. Dobriansky assured a Senate committee this month.

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