is available here. Excerpts:
"Billions of people face shortages of food and water and increased risk of flooding, experts at a major climate change conference have warned.
....
"It's the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit," said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
...
Key findings of the report include:
75-250 million people across Africa could face water shortages by 2020
Crop yields increase could increase by 20% in East and Southeast Asia, but decrease by up to 30% in Central and South Asia
Agriculture fed by rainfall could drop by 50% in some African countries by 2020
20-30% of all plant and animal species at increased risk of extinction if temperatures rise between 1.5-2.5C
Glaciers and snow cover expected to decline, reducing water availability in countries supplied by melt water
The report states that the observed increase in the global average temperature was "very likely" due to man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
The scientific work reviewed by IPCC scientists includes more than 29,000 pieces of data on observed changes in physical and biological aspects of the natural world.
Eighty-nine percent of these, it believes, are consistent with a warming world."
This is the second IPCC report , the third is due in May and a final summing up in November.
UPDATE: More on the climate divide here. Excerpt:
"In almost every instance, the people most at risk from climate change live in countries that have contributed least to the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases linked to the recent warming of the planet.
Those most vulnerable countries also tend to be the poorest. And the countries that face the least harm - and are best equipped to deal with the harm they do face - tend to be the richest.
To advocates of unified action to curb greenhouse gases, this growing realization is not welcome news.
"The original idea was that we were all in this together, and that was an easier idea to sell," said Robert Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale University.
"But the research is not supporting that. We're not in it together."
The large industrialized countries are more resilient partly because of geography; they are mostly in mid-latitude regions with Goldilocks climates - neither too hot nor too cold.
Many enjoy gifts like the thick rich soil and generous growing season of the American corn belt or the forgiving weather of France and New Zealand.
But a bigger factor is their wealth - wealth built at least partly on a century or more of burning coal, oil and the other fossil fuels that underlie their mobile, industrial, climate-controlled way of life."
