Global warming will roil Americas

If you listen to some of the experts who issued a much-awaited U.N. report on global warming in Paris last week, it sounds like rising oceans will soon make their way to your bedroom and force you to hop out of bed in the middle of the night.
It sounds a little bit far fetched, but many scientists say that climate changes will have a greater impact -- and closer to home -- than many of us think.
Earlier this week, after more than 500 leading scientists from 113 nations issued the preliminary findings of a U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, I called several authors of the report to ask them what can we expect to happen in the Western Hemisphere if global warming continues at its present pace.
The U.N. report said that world temperatures will rise by two to 11 degrees this century -- mainly because of the massive U.S. burning of fossil fuels and the rapid deforestation of the Amazon forest -- and that this will cause oceans to rise by 7 inches to 2 feet over the same period of time. The report did not give regional forecasts. A more specific report is due out later this year.
So, based on these general projections, I asked Osvaldo F. Canziani, co-chairman of one of the panel's groups, in a telephone interview, what we can expect to happen in this part of the world.
Canziani said we will see a 1- to 2-centigrade rise in temperature over the next two decades, which will cause havoc in several countries:
Rising oceans will cause severe flooding in U.S. coastal areas, Caribbean beach resorts, the Gulf of Mexico and the Rio de la Plata Basin. This could affect major cities, such as Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
Glaciers in the Andean mountain range of Peru, Colombia and Ecuador will melt at an increasingly faster pace, creating water accumulations that will cause flooding and mudslides. This will pose great danger to many mountain villages.
Meantime, deforestation of the Amazon as Brazil and its neighbors destroy huge jungle regions to, among other things, expand their booming soybean exports to China, will reduce rainfall in much of South America. This will lead to more forest fires and a greater shortage of water in many areas.
Shifting air currents, in addition to deforestation, will make rainfall levels drop in some areas and increase in others. Rainfall will drop by up to 20 percent in Mexico, Central America, northeastern Brazil and southern Chile, while it will increase by up to 15 percent in South America's Rio de la Plata Basin stretching through Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay.
Most experts agreed that poor people in the region will suffer the greatest losses because they tend to live in more exposed areas and in more fragile homes and often lack quick warning systems.
"In Latin America, politicians haven't realized the seriousness of this issue yet," Canziani told me.
Critics of the U.N. report say there have been many previous U.N. apocalyptic warnings that turned out to be wrong, and that it's far from certain that global warming is caused by fossil fuel emissions, as the U.N. panel concluded. They point out that there were periods of global warming thousands of years ago, long before humans began driving Hummers.
"The panel's report is not conclusive," says Israel Ortega, a spokesman for the Heritage Foundation in Washington. "The debate is just beginning."
My opinion: I agree that U.N. scientific panels are not always right. In the late 1970s, U.N. climate experts were predicting an imminent Ice Age and worsening famines in India.
Food exporter
Instead, the world turned out to get hotter, and India is now exporting food.
But common sense tells me that something weird is happening. Over the past few years, we have seen extreme weather conditions in the United States, the first hurricane along Brazil's coast and golf-ball-sized ice cubes falling on usually balmy Buenos Aires. The weather is going crazy.
Post script: The Venezuela Information Office, which according to its Web site is funded by the Venezuelan government, says I incorrectly stated in my last column that a new "enabling law" will allow President Hugo Chavez to, among other things, call a referendum to change the Constitution and allow his indefinite reelection. Indeed, Chavez has repeatedly said he will do that, but this is unrelated to the new law.
Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune.