The IPCC process got a bit rambunctious, with scientists and government officials duking out to the last moment in deciding how to word the 'impacts' summary for policy makers from the fourth assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

An excerpt from the NYT story:

Scientists unveiled today the most detailed portrait yet of a world already in the midst of climatic and coastal changes, driven by global warming from human activities.

They said the earth’s climate and ecosystems were already being affected, for better and mostly for worse, by the atmospheric buildup of smokestack and tailpipe gases that trap heat. And they said that while limits on emissions could lower the risks, vulnerable regions must adjust promptly to shifting weather patterns and rising seas.

Martin Parry, co-chairman of the team that wrote the new report, identified the areas most affected as the Arctic, sub-Saharan Africa, small islands and Asia’s sprawling, crowded, flood-prone river deltas.

The conclusions, in the latest report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, came after four days of sometimes rancorous editing by hundreds of scientists and government officials who have been meeting here since Monday. The panel has tracked research on human-caused global warming since it was created under United Nations auspices in 1988.

In a sign of shifting geopolitics on global warming, scientists who worked on the report singled out China among a group of nations that watered down some language in the 21-page summary, while they credited the United States, which for years had stressed the uncertainty in the science, with playing a mostly constructive role now.

China is poised to surpass the United States as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping greenhouse gas, and it has been under growing diplomatic pressure — along with the United States — to agree to binding limits on emissions.

More of the same from the AP story on TheStar.com:

As the world gets hotter by degrees, millions of poor people will suffer from hunger, thirst, floods and disease unless drastic action is taken, scientists and diplomats warned Friday in their bleakest report ever on global warming.

All regions of the world will change, with the risk that nearly a third of the Earth's species will vanish if global temperatures rise just 3.6 degrees above the average temperature in the 1980s-90s, the new climate report says. Areas that now have too little rain will become drier.

Yet that grim and still preventable future is a toned-down prediction, a compromise brokered in a fierce, around-the-clock debate among scientists and bureaucrats. Officials from some governments, including China and Saudi Arabia, managed to win some weakened wording.

Even so, the final report "will send a very, very clear signal" to governments, said Yvo de Boer, the top climate official for the United Nations, which in 1988 created the authoritative climate change panel that issued the starkly worded document.

And while some scientists were angered at losing some ground, many praised the report as the strongest warning ever that nations must cut back on greenhouse gas emissions.

The report is the second of four coming this year from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations network of 2,000 scientists. The new document tries to explain how global warming is changing life on Earth; the panel's report in February focused on the cause of global warming and said scientists are highly confident most of it is due to human activity.

The 120-plus governments that participate must unanimously approve all four reports, and the scientists must approve all changes.

That edict made for a deadline-busting contentious final editing session that was closed to the public. However, The Associated Press witnessed the hectic final 3 1/2 hours of objections and conflict.

At one point, Chinese and Saudi Arabian delegates tried to reduce the scientific confidence level about already noticeable effects of global warming. They lower the confidence level from 90 per cent to 80 per cent. Scientists objected, and one lead author from the United States, NASA's Cynthia Rosenzweig, left the building after filing an official protest.

"There is a discernible human influence on these changes" that are already occurring through flooding, heat waves, hurricanes and threats to species, she said.

Under a U.S.-proposed compromise, the final report deleted any mention of the level of confidence about global warming's current effects. And that may have saved the day, according to some scientists who said the report had appeared doomed over that issue.

There were other disputes where scientists lost out:

Instead of saying "hundreds of millions" would be vulnerable to flooding under certain scenarios, the final document says "many millions."

Instead of suggesting up to 120 million people are at risk of hunger because of global warming, the revised report refers to negative effects on subsidence farmers and fishers.

Often it was the U.S. delegation who stood with scientists and helped reach compromise, said Stanford University scientist Stephen Schneider, a frequent critic of the Bush administration's global warming policies.

British scientist Neil Adger said he and others were disappointed that government officials deleted parts of a chart that highlights the devastating effects of climate change with every rise of 1.8 degrees in temperature.

Some scientists bitterly vowed never to take part in the process again.

Still, Adger and other scientists and even environmental groups hailed the final report as the strongest ever.

"This is a glimpse into an apocalyptic future," the Greenpeace environmental group said of the final report.

While the U.S. got some credit in those above stories, check out the Washington Post's version:

Some sections of a grim scientific assessment of the impact of global warming on human, animal and plant life issued in Brussels yesterday were softened at the insistence of officials from China and the United States, participants in the negotiations said.

In particular, U.S. negotiators managed to eliminate language in one section that called for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, said Patricia Romero Lankao, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., who was one of the report's lead authors.

In the course of negotiations over the report by the second working group of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, U.S. officials challenged the wording of a section suggesting that policymakers need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because countries will not be able to respond to climate change simply by using adaptive measures such as levees and dikes.

In that instance, the original draft read: "However, adaptation alone is not expected to cope with all the projected effects of climate change, and especially not over the long run as most impacts increase in magnitude. Mitigation measures will therefore also be required." That second sentence does not appear in the final version of the IPCC Summary for Policymakers.

In a conference call with reporters early yesterday morning, Sharon Hayes, associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said there was "a good deal of discussion" in Brussels over how best to summarize the report's scientific conclusions.

"And in this summary document there was a lot of care taken by all of the nations involved in the discussion to make sure that the certainty statements in this document -- whether scientists felt they had medium certainty or high certainty or very high certainty about different projected impacts -- were accurately reflected," Hayes said.

She declined to discuss specific negotiations over language, saying only that the U.S. government is satisfied with the final report.