In the end, governments accepted evidence from the world's top scientists that climate change impacts could be abrupt and irreversible, and require urgent action.
"The threat is real," said United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
"I have seen the impacts of climate change in Antarctica and the Amazon with my own eyes," Ban said in a press conference in Valencia, Spain, at Saturday's public unveiling of the Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
"It is a very strong document. It sends a stark message that we face abrupt and irreversible impacts," said Hans Verolme, director of the climate change program for the international environmental group WWF.
"The report shows that the window for action is closing. Policy-makers need to take action," Verolme told Tierramérica in an interview from Valencia Saturday.
"The Synthesis Report sets out concrete and affordable ways to deal with (climate change)," noted Ban.
The report details various effects, including increased extreme weather and sea level rises of more than one meter by 2100, and what future global temperature increases may come, depending on how much more carbon dioxide (CO2 - the main greenhouse-effect gas) ends up in the atmosphere.
Previously, the IPCC had suggested stabilizing the climate by preventing CO2 concentrations from surpassing about 450 parts per million by 2050. Current CO2 levels are around 381 ppm.
Shockingly absent from the new report is the scientific assessment of the need to reduce emissions 25 to 40 percent by 2020 in order to achieve that stabilization target.
At an informal IPCC meeting Aug. 31 in Vienna, representatives from industrialized countries agreed that greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
Based on the dire warnings from scientists of the need to sharply curb emissions, even the United States and Canada "swallowed hard and accepted this", says Verolme.
Although Verolme thought this first-ever agreement on a reduction range for industrialized nations was mentioned in one of the report's many tables, Tierramérica could find no reference to it anywhere.
It appears not to have survived the word-by-word examination by government representatives.
"There is no debate about the science. The debates are about the words," says Monirul Mirza, an environmental scientist at the University of Toronto and one of the three dozen authors of the draft of the Synthesis Report.
"We summarized the key findings of the main report," Mirza told Tierramérica from Valencia.
Confidential early drafts had previously been sent to every country and to representatives of civil society such as WWF for comment. After their review and revisions, the governments approved the text in Valencia.
"It is a very transparent process. Countries cannot play around with the scientific findings," he said.
But Verolme disagrees, saying that government representatives tend to water down the scientific findings in the summaries.
The summary of "The Physical Science Basis" report, released in February, failed to mention the increased incidence of potentially destructive hurricanes, the warming of the Pacific Ocean and the loss of glaciers in the European Alps, he said.
The negotiations were closed to the media and Mirza could not comment on what words the co
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