The national academy is an elite independent organization chartered to give the federal government advice on science and technical matters. Being elected as an academy member is considered a major honor for a scientist.

Bold actions are necessary because “climate change is occurring, the Earth is warming … concentrations of carbon dioxide are increasing, and there are very clear fingerprints that link [those effects] to humans,” said Pamela A. Matson of Stanford University, who chaired one of five panels organized by the academy.

In a series of three reports, the panel tried to illustrate the challenge ahead by describing tons of polluting gases as money in a budget. America is on an escalating trajectory to blow its budget. The budget allows for the use of 170 to 200 billion tons between now and 2050. In 2008, America spewed 7 billion tons of greenhouse gas.

“That’s a very challenging task,” scientist Robert W. Fri told the Times. “At the current rate of 7 billion tons per year, we would use up the allotment well before 2050. Even if all available and emerging technologies could be deployed to their fullest technical potential, it is clear we will still need new and additional emission reduction options.”

The report also pushed for an emissions trading program known as cap-and-trade, which would set a limit on the amount of greenhouse gases a company could release. Companies that go over their limits could buy credits from firms with lower emissions. The Obama administration supports cap-and-trade and Congress is expected to renew debate on the issue this summer.

The America’s Climate Choices suite of studies will include two additional reports that will be released later this year: Informing Effective Decisions and Actions Related to Climate Change will examine how to best provide decision makers information on climate change, and a final overarching report, America’s Climate Choices, will build on each of the previous reports to offer a scientific framework for shaping the policy choices underlying the nation’s efforts to confront climate change.

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At an experimental government farm in the western Amazon’s Rondonia state, researchers analyze grass seeds under microscopes, shake soil samples in test tubes, and measure the milk production of a new breed of cows.

While high-profile police raids targeting illegal ranchers and loggers in the Amazon grab more headlines, these scientists may produce a more important solution in the long fight to save the greatest rainforest.

Their aim is to reduce the pressure for forest destruction by raising the productivity of pastures through fertilization, better choice of grass, and planting trees.

Brazil’s ability to meet its ambitious 2020 target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent from 2005 levels depends largely on the ability of its agriculture sector, and particularly its huge cattle industry, to meet growing world demand without destroying more forest.

The cattle industry is the main culprit of deforestation, which accounts for around 75 percent of carbon emissions in Brazil, one of the top global emitters.

“Brazil’s emissions targets hinge significantly on its cattle industry,” said Paulo Barreto, senior researcher with Imazon, an environmental institute in the Amazon city Belem.

At stake is not only Brazil’s role in climate change but also the competitiveness of its agriculture in a global market increasingly demanding eco-friendly products. Its beef exports account for $5.3 billion each year. Major importers of Brazilian beef products include Russia, China, Iran and the United States, as well as Britain and Italy.

Environment group Greenpeace said in a June report that consumers around the world were unwittingly fueling destruction of the Amazon by buying hamburgers and shoes linked to illegal deforestation. That spurred a wave of pledges by big meat processors aimed at reducing deforestation by farmers who supply them.

“Our producers know if they try to expand their land, they won’t have a market anymore. They’ll have to use the area they have better,” Agriculture Minister Reinhold Stephanes told Reuters.

Near the town of Ji-Parana in southern Rondonia, farmers on their own initiative have planted trees on pasture land, giving cattle and pasture shade from the scorching sun and introducing nitrogen into the ground through the trees’ roots.

The richer pasture and healthier cattle will allow the cooperative to raise 5.2 animals per hectare, nearly triple its previous rate.

Brazil’s 200 million head of cattle, more than a third of which is in the Amazon, occupy an area nearly three times the size of Texas, or on average 1 per hectare (2.47 acres).

“We have the land and technology today that allows us to expand cattle ranching without chopping down a single tree,” said Luiz Carlos Balbino, senior Embrapa researcher.

He says Brazil can double or triple beef production without deforesting by boosting the productivity of existing pastures, recovering degraded grass lands, and developing as much as 50 million hectares (123.5 million acres) of unforested savanna.

FROM FOREST DEFENDERS TO CRIMINALS

But many ranchers are set in their ways and continue to slash and burn. Most were invited by the military government in the 1970s to populate the region to help defend the Amazon against alleged foreign designs on its natural resources. Back then they were told to deforest; now they’re told to reforest, complains one of their leaders.

“We came as human shields and now they turn us into criminals. If a settler is caught chopping down trees to survive, he goes to prison without bail,” said Francisco Ferreira Cabral, head of the Rondonia Agriculture Federation.

For decades ranchers and farmers have slashed and burned, consuming one-fifth of the world’s largest rain forest.

Poor soil quality means ranchers and farmers often abandon the land after a few years to push deeper into the forest.

From above, Rondonia state looks more like the Irish countryside than the western Amazon. Green pasture land has replaced most of the jungle, and cows have taken the place of jaguars, giant anteaters and hundreds of other species once roaming the area. The number of cattle — 11 million — is nearly triple the human population.

“There is hardly any forest left in the state, only in parks and Indian reserves, and even that is threatened,” said Cesar Luiz da Silva Guimaraes, head of the local office of the government environmental agency Ibama.

In June, police had to abandon attempts to pull 30,000 cows out of Bom Futuro national forest in Rondonia. Ranchers had made death threats, burned police cars and succeeded in pressuring the federal government to back off.

Some ranchers believe in conservation but don’t have the know-how or financial resources to buy fertilizer, equipment or proper seeds to improve their business.

“It’s not enough to give them technology, we need to give them the resources to apply it,” said Ibama’s Guimaraes. “If they don’t have access to credit, it’s cheaper to slash and burn. It costs you a box of matches.”

Many farmers lack proper land titles, meaning they have no collateral to put up for a loan.

While technology is available to increase output on existing land, it requires investments, infrastructure and a change in producer mentality.

That could take decades to apply — time that the Amazon does not have. Although the deforestation rate has fallen to a 20-year low, helped by stepped-up police raids on illegal loggers and lower global demand for soy and beef, the 7,000 sq km (2,700 square miles) lost in the year to July still represents a major source of emissions. Scientists say it could lead to higher temperatures and less rain, risking a desertification process.

The government has set a goal to regenerate 8-9 million hectares (19.8-22.2 million acres) of degraded land in 10 years an area larger than Scotland. But a 2 billion reais ($1.16 billion) line of credit it made available this year for that purpose — the first ever — has gone virtually untapped.

“We haven’t found the way to make this attractive yet,” Stephanes said, blaming red tape and high interest rates.

DOUBTS ON 10-YEAR TARGET

Coinciding with the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen this month, leading meat packers will launch a satellite tracking system that uses implanted microchips to identify cows, helping them to avoid buying cattle from illegally cleared land.

Most conservationists applaud the measure but say the deal requires independent monitoring and worry that it excludes slaughterhouses that account for as much 40 percent of the beef market.

Like attempts to control drug-trafficking, experts say, measures to reduce illegally-produced beef will only work when the underlying economics change. As long as it remains cheaper to chop down trees than boost output on existing pastures, ranchers will do so, they say.

“The cattle industry goes to wherever land is cheapest and that’s the Amazon,” said Egon Krakhecke, secretary for rural sustainable development in the Environment Ministry.

Brazil’s agriculture minister remains confident that the cattle industry will do its part to help Brazil meet its 2020 carbon emissions target, as more ranchers see that environmental awareness makes good business sense as well.

“The long-term productivity gains far outweigh the initial investment — we need to spread that message,” said Stephanes.

“Brazil has shown before it can successfully apply technology — 10 years is more than enough time for this,” he said.

Yet scientists on the ground are less optimistic.

“Technology helps but isn’t an aspirin you take to fix the problem. You need investments, logistics, a change in attitude — we’re talking a generation to change things,” said Embrapa’s Balbino.

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Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.

But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June’s UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: “We can go into extra time but we can’t afford a replay.”

At the deal’s heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.

Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.

Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world’s biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.

Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of “exported emissions” so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than “old Europe”, must not suffer more than their richer partners.

The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.

But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.

Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.

Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”.

It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.

The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.

This editorial will be published tomorrow by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages including Chinese, Arabic and Russian. The text was drafted by a Guardian team during more than a month of consultations with editors from more than 20 of the papers involved. Like the Guardian most of the newspapers have taken the unusual step of featuring the editorial on their front page.

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• Melting glaciers, early snowmelt and severe droughts will cause more dramatic water shortages in the American West.
• Rising sea levels will lead to coastal flooding on the Eastern seaboard, in Florida, and in other areas, such as the Gulf of Mexico.
• Warmer sea surface temperatures will fuel more intense hurricanes in the southeastern Atlantic and Gulf coasts.
• Forests, farms and cities will face troublesome new pests and more mosquito-borne diseases.
• Disruption of habitats such as coral reefs and alpine meadows could drive many plant and animal species to extinction.

Carbon dioxide and other air pollution that is collecting in the atmosphere like a thickening blanket, trapping the sun’s heat and causing the planet to warm up. Coal-burning power plants are the largest U.S. source of carbon dioxide pollution — they produce 2.5 billion tons every year. Automobiles, the second largest source, create nearly 1.5 billion tons of CO2 annually.

Here’s the good news: technologies exist today to make cars that run cleaner and burn less gas, modernize power plants and generate electricity from nonpolluting sources, and cut our electricity use through energy efficiency. The challenge is to be sure these solutions are put to use.

Although local temperatures fluctuate naturally, over the past 50 years the average global temperature has increased at the fastest rate in recorded history. And experts think the trend is accelerating: the 10 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1990. Scientists say that unless we curb global warming emissions, average U.S. temperatures could be 3 to 9 degrees higher by the end of the century.

Global warming is already causing damage in many parts of the United States. In 2002, Colorado, Arizona and Oregon endured their worst wildfire seasons ever. The same year, drought created severe dust storms in Montana, Colorado and Kansas, and floods caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage in Texas, Montana and North Dakota. Since the early 1950s, snow accumulation has declined 60 percent and winter seasons have shortened in some areas of the Cascade Range in Oregon and Washington.

Of course, the impacts of global warming are not limited to the United States. In 2003, extreme heat waves caused more than 20,000 deaths in Europe and more than 1,500 deaths in India. And in what scientists regard as an alarming sign of events to come, the area of the Arctic’s perennial polar ice cap is declining at the rate of 9 percent per decade.

There are many simple steps you can take right now to cut global warming pollution. Make conserving energy a part of your daily routine. Each time you choose a compact fluorescent light bulb over an incandescent bulb, for example, you’ll lower your energy bill and keep nearly 700 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the air over the bulb’s lifetime. By opting for a refrigerator with the Energy Star label — indicating it uses at least 15 percent less energy than the federal requirement — over a less energy-efficient model, you can reduce carbon dioxide pollution by nearly a ton in total.

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