Scientists criticized the U.N. global warming report for being too soft as a result of pressure by some governments, it was reported on Saturday.

The study findings were watered down at the last minute by governments seeking to deflect calls for action, the Los Angeles Times quoted scientists as saying.

Some nations lobbied for changes that blunt the study, said the paper, quoting some contributors of the UN report.

The report, issued Friday, paints a bleak picture of Earth's future: hundreds of millions of people short of water, extreme food shortages in Africa, a landscape ravaged by floods and millions of species sentenced to extinction.

Despite its harsh vision outlining devastating effects that will strike all regions of the world and all levels of society, the report was quickly criticized by some scientists who said its findings were hijacked by some governments.

"The science got hijacked by the political bureaucrats at the late stage of the game," said John Walsh, a climate expert at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who helped write a chapter on the polar regions.

"It's the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit (by global warming)," said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The report is also, in a sense, a more pointed indictment of the world's biggest polluters - the industrialized nations - and a more specific identification of those who will suffer, said the paper.

Thus, some nations lobbied for last-minute changes to the dire predictions. Negotiations led to deleting some timelines for events, as well as some forecasts on how many people would be affected on each continent as global temperatures rose, the paper noted.

An earlier draft, for example, specified that water would become increasingly scarce for up to 1 billion people in Asia if temperatures rose 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit - a point that previous studies have said is likely to be reached by 2100.

Compared with previous studies which said 19 of the 20 hottest years on record have occurred since 1980, the latest report said that more frequent and more intense heat waves were "very likely" in the future.

The report is the second of four scheduled to be issued this year by the U.N., which marshaled more than 2,500 scientists to give their best predictions of the consequences of a few degrees increase in temperature. The first report, released in February, said global warming was irreversible but could be moderated by large-scale societal changes.

Source: Xinhua