Melt from Andes to Arctic may spur U.N. climate pact

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

TROMSOE, Norway (Reuters) - A fast melt of ice from the Andes to the Arctic should be a wake-up call for governments to work out a strong new United Nations treaty this year to fight climate change, Norway said on Tuesday.

Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere, starting two-day talks of the eight Arctic nations and scientists in the northern city of Tromsoe, said ice was vanishing from land around the planet as temperatures increase, raising sea levels.

"It is a global phenomenon reflecting global warming," he told a news conference, referring to a thaw in places such as "the Himalayas, the Alps, the Andes, Kilimanjaro, Greenland, the South Pole or the North Pole."

Stoere said he and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, also attending the Tromsoe talks, planned to set up a task force of experts to study the melt and report to a U.N. conference in Copenhagen in December that is due to agree a new climate pact.

Latest evidence of the melt would be a "clarion call, a real wake-up message to Copenhagen," he said.

Many glaciers are retreating but until now, he said the links between a thaw on mountains in the tropics and the Arctic have not been highlighted enough, he said.

Vanishing ice "is not in the grey zone of probabilities, it is about to happen. It is serious, we have to deal with it," he said.

The U.N. Climate Panel projected in 2007 world sea levels would rise by between 18 and 59 cms (7-23 inches) this century. Some scientists have said the rate is likely to be closer to a meter.