By Alister Doyle
Paris - The United Nations climate panel agreed in its starkest warning yet on Thursday that human activities are causing global warming that may bring more droughts, heatwaves and rising seas, delegates said.
The report, due for release on Friday and bolstering conclusions from a 2001 study, may put pressure on governments and companies to do more to curb greenhouse gases mainly from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars.
Scientists and government officials in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the most authoritative group on global warming, agreed it was "very likely" that human activities were the main cause of warming in the past 50 years, delegates said.
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In IPCC language, "very likely" means at least 90 percent probability and is the strongest link to human activities since the IPCC was set up in 1988. The previous study in 2001 said a link was "likely", or 66 percent probable.
IPCC officials declined comment, saying that the report would be issued on Friday at 10.30am. "Nobody's challenging the scientific findings, just the wording," one delegate said, adding the talks might last until early Friday.
The Eiffel Tower, near the meeting hall, and some French homes shut off lights for five minutes on Thursday night in an action to highlight energy waste and global warming, briefly cutting France's power consumption by one percent.
The IPCC, grouping 2 500 scientists from 130 countries, is also set to say that oceans will keep rising for more than 1 000 years even if governments stabilise greenhouse gas emissions.
The report is the first of four this year by the panel that will outline threats of warming.
Delegates said the Paris meeting, looking at the science of global warming, agreed a "best estimate" that temperatures will rise by three degrees Celsius by 2100 over pre-industrial levels, the biggest change in a century for thousands of years.
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