(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-11-16 11:40

VALENCIA, Spain - Negotiators working on a landmark global warming report don't need to go far to see the effects of climate change: The evidence is all around the Mediterranean resort where they are meeting.

Sea water threatens to inundate rice paddies in use since Spain was an Arab kingdom in the eighth century. Seashore hotels dredge sand from the seabed to fill in eroding beaches. Stinging jellyfish are proliferating in the warmer water, plaguing swimmers. Bird migrations have altered.

And last month, the village of El Verger was battered by the worst flooding Jose Mengual has seen in all his 95 years.

Though anecdotal, it all fits in with the projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Nobel Prize-winning body meeting here to prepare a definitive report on the science of climate change.

The report, to be released Saturday, provides scientific background for policymakers attending a meeting next month in Bali, Indonesia, who will discuss future action to control emissions of carbon and other gases blamed for the Earth's rising temperature.

The Kyoto Protocol, negotiated in 1997, obliges 36 industrial countries to radically reduce their carbon emissions by 2012, but has no clear plan for what happens after that date. Although the United States rejected the Kyoto accord, it will attend the Bali meeting that will try to launch negotiations on a post-2012 emissions regime.

The World Wide Fund for Nature, an observer at the IPCC's Valencia meeting, arranged a neighborhood tour for reporters to show that climate change is an observable fact and no longer just a theory.

What can be seen happening "goes beyond the incremental changes you would expect in a natural system," says Hans Verolme, WWF's climate specialist, although he acknowledged it would be difficult to prove that everything shown on the tour was caused by climate change.

The IPCC says the emission of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases has raised the Earth's average temperature by 1.3 degrees in the last 30 years. But it has gone up nearly twice as much in Spain, by 2.5 degrees in the same period.

Scientists also say the sea has been rising an average 0.07 inches per year since 1961, a serious threat to parts of this coastal agricultural zone known for its vast orange groves as well as rice.

Within sight of Valencia's towering beachside hotels, rice farmers worry about the sea washing across their crops, said Heikki Willstedt, an energy expert from the Spanish WWF.

Once a marshland, it was sealed off from the sea in the 19th century and converted to farmland and fresh water lakes. But now it could easily return to salt unless trends are halted, Willstedt said.

Valero Moya, 47, a cafe owner and avid nature watcher who has lived in the area for most of his life, says winters have become so mild that storks and other birds stay year-round rather than migrate to Africa. But they are laying fewer eggs, he says.

The most noticeable change is the weather. "We are getting heavy rainfall, more intense, but far less rain overall," he said.

The IPCC report being debated in Valencia says that the "risks from extreme weather events" has become more obvious in the last six years since the prestigious UN panel issued its last report.

No need to talk about extreme weather to Antonia Mengual. Still cleaning the mud stains off the walls of her home, she told of rescuing her 95-year-old father, Jose, just before the house was engulfed by the Girona River last month.

She said it rained heavily in the hills above El Verger, rapidly feeding the river that flows through a cement channel about 20 feet below street level. Within hours, water had overflowed into the streets and filled the ground floor of the family house. The floodwater washed away furniture and two chandeliers, she said, pointing to the water mark about 8 feet on the wall.

"My father has never seen anything like this," she said, scrubbing the wooden door frames. "A bubble of water came rushing down. Then it disappeared as fast as it came."