European Diary:Valencia's City of Arts and Science provided the perfect backdrop for the launch of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) fourth report at the weekend, writes, Jamie Smyth
Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava's museum and opera house project looks like it came straight out of the space age, highlighting just what the human race is capable of as it engages with its biggest challenge of the 21st century.
Fresh from visits to countries suffering the impact of global warming, UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon told delegates the humbling scenes he had witnessed were as "frightening as a science fiction movie".
"In Antarctica, the message was chillingly simple: the continent's glaciers are melting . . . In the Amazon, I saw how the rainforest - the lungs of the earth - is being suffocated," said Ban, who described the fight against climate change as the defining challenge of our age.
The UN secretary general's observations were backed up by the science contained in the IPCC's fourth assessment report, which warned of the "abrupt" and "irreversible" consequences of climate change.
The message is simple: politicians have to agree a deal in upcoming talks in Bali to curb greenhouse gas emissions now, or the world faces potentially catastrophic consequences in this century or the next.
On the margins of the five-day session in Valencia, scientists, government officials, NGO members and journalists spent much of the week analysing how they thought the world's big emitters - the US, China and India - were likely to play their hand in Bali.
Pat Finnegan, an IPCC member and co-ordinator of the Irish environmental NGO Grian, said he saw small signs of change in the US stand on climate change, which he had also noted at two previous UN meetings.
"I think this is on foot of much stronger public awareness of the dangers of climate change in the US," said Finnegan, who pointed to the popularity of the "green" California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Nevertheless, the Bush administration is still playing semantics. In a conference call convened just as scientists put the finishing touches to the report, Jim Connaughton, chairman of the US council of environmental quality, insisted there was still no clear scientific definition of the dangers posed by global warming.
"The scientific definition of that is lacking, and so we are operating within the construct of, again, strong agreement among world leaders that urgent action is warranted," said Connaughton, a former lobbyist for the energy industry, who is now the senior environmental, energy and natural resources adviser to President Bush.
Stephanie Turnmore, an observer at the IPCC representing Greenpeace, said the US delegation had tried to remove one of the strongest sections from the summary for policymakers report, which will be presented to environment ministers in Bali.
"They didn't want the five 'reasons for concern' in the summary, but in the end it was put in . . . The summary should be kept on the desks of all environment ministers when they meet in two weeks to discuss a successor to Kyoto," said Turnmore.
But there are definite signs of a change of attitude among other climate change sceptics, notably Australia - one of the world's worst greenhouse gas polluters per capita, which, along with the US, has refused to ratify the 1997 Kyoto protocol aimed at curbing emissions.
"As a statement of fact there has been a big change in political thinking on climate change in Australia, and it is a central feature of the current election campaign," says Dr Bill Hare, an Australian scientist and one of the lead authors of the IPCC report.
"The current John Howard government has said it will not ratify Kyoto while the opposition has said it will . . . the last seven years of drought, an unprecedented drought, has had an impact on the public," says Dr Hare.
But as UN secretary general Ban noted in his address to delegates, every country must play its part in tackling climate change if a solution is to be found. And Ireland, which had just one Government representative in Valencia - which was less than many poor countries taking part in the IPCC session - will also have to make huge efforts to tackle emissions, which are now 25 per cent above 1990 levels (our Kyoto commitment is to allow levels 13 per cent higher than 1990).
"The emission figures point to the fact that Ireland has got an incredible challenge ahead of it," says Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is organising the climate change talks in Bali.
He says Ireland must try to improve industrial energy efficiency, move to new kinds of power-generating capacity, try to come to grips with the transportation sector, persuade people to buy cars that use less petrol and use energy-efficient appliances.
Following publication of Saturday's report, the climate change challenge has now passed from scientists to politicians and the public that votes them into office. Let's hope we can all rise to meet this challenge.