World's scientists to issue Copenhagen warning

Climate change scientists are to hold an emergency summit in Copenhagen next month to collate the latest findings in climate science and step up pressure on the UN negotiating process to ensure any deal agreed later this year is informed by the scientific realities of global warming.

The International Scientific Congress on Climate Change will run from 10-12 March and is being organised by the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU), including the University of Copenhagen, Yale, UC Berkeley, Tokyo, Oxford and Cambridge.

It will feature keynotes from IPCC Chairman Dr. RK Pachauri, Lord Nicholas Stern, and President of the European Commission José M. Barroso, as well as a raft of the world's top climate scientists and will address the extent to which a "technological fix" to climate change is now possible, the likely costs of inaction, and the scale of the global security threat climate change presents.

In addition, the conference aims to "bridge the four year data gap left by the leading global scientific body on climate change – the IPCC – with its latest reports".

Scientists are increasingly concerned that the official scientific reports being used to underpin current negotiations to agree a successor to the Kyoto deal are out of date and fail to take into account growing evidence of so-called carbon feedbacks, such as increased methane emissions as a result of melting perma-frost, that many experts fear could accelerate global warming further.

One of the key questions at the conference will be whether targets to limit warming to two degrees above pre-industrial levels are still realistic and the extent to which governments should balance efforts to cut emissions with investment in adaptation.

The conference is expected to culminate in a new synthesis of the latest climate change science that it will publish the summer and present to negotiators involved in talks to agree a successor to Kyoto by the end of this year.

Speaking to The Guardian, Katherine Richardson, a marine biologist at the University of Copenhagen, said the synthesis would make direct calls on policy-makers to respond. "This is not a regular scientific conference," she said. "This is a deliberate attempt to influence policy."

In related news, controversial scientist James Lovelock this weekend warned that the UK should shift its focus from attempting to increase renewable energy capacity and cut emissions to adapting its economy to operate in a much hotter world.

Writing in The Sunday Times, he argued that it was too late to curb dangerous levels of climate change and advised that those regions geographically positioned to avoid the worst effects of climate changes, such as the UK, Scandinavia, New Zealand, Canada and Japan, should adopt nationalist policies that would allow them to become increasingly self sufficient and resilient.