Countdown to global catastrophe

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Mon, 24 Jan 2005 06:46:53 -0800

[Zepps_News] Countdown to global catastrophe

 

 

 

 

<http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=603975>

 

Countdown to global catastrophe

Climate change: report warns point of no return may be reached in 10

years, leading to droughts, agricultural failure and water shortages

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor

 

24 January 2005

 

The global warming danger threshold for the world is clearly marked for

the first time in an international report to be published tomorrow - and

the bad news is, the world has nearly reached it already.

 

The countdown to climate-change catastrophe is spelt out by a task force

of senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the

world - and it is remarkably brief. In as little as 10 years, or even

less, their report indicates, the point of no return with global warming

may have been reached.

 

The report, Meeting The Climate Challenge, is aimed at policymakers in

every country, from national leaders down. It has been timed to coincide

with Tony Blair's promised efforts to advance climate change policy in

2005 as chairman of both the G8 group of rich countries and the European

Union.

 

And it breaks new ground by putting a figure - for the first time in

such a high-level document - on the danger point of global warming, that

is, the temperature rise beyond which the world would be irretrievably

committed to disastrous changes. These could include widespread

agricultural failure, water shortages and major droughts, increased

disease, sea-level rise and the death of forests - with the added

possibility of abrupt catastrophic events such as " runaway " global

warming, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or the switching-off of

the Gulf Stream.

 

The report says this point will be two degrees centigrade above the

average world temperature prevailing in 1750 before the industrial

revolution, when human activities - mainly the production of waste gases

such as carbon dioxide (CO2), which retain the sun's heat in the

atmosphere - first started to affect the climate. But it points out that

global average temperature has already risen by 0.8 degrees since then,

with more rises already in the pipeline - so the world has little more

than a single degree of temperature latitude before the crucial point is

reached.

 

More ominously still, it assesses the concentration of carbon dioxide in

the atmosphere after which the two-degree rise will become inevitable,

and says it will be 400 parts per million by volume (ppm) of CO2.

 

The current level is 379ppm, and rising by more than 2ppm annually - so

it is likely that the vital 400ppm threshold will be crossed in just 10

years' time, or even less (although the two-degree temperature rise

might take longer to come into effect).

 

" There is an ecological timebomb ticking away, " said Stephen Byers, the

former transport secretary, who co-chaired the task force that produced

the report with the US Republican senator Olympia Snowe. It was

assembled by the Institute for Public Policy Research in the UK, the

Centre for American Progress in the US, and The Australia Institute.The

group's chief scientific adviser is Dr Rakendra Pachauri, chairman of

the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

 

The report urges all the G8 countries to agree to generate a quarter of

their electricity from renewable sources by 2025, and to double their

research spending on low-carbon energy technologies by 2010. It also

calls on the G8 to form a climate group with leading developing nations

such as India and China, which have big and growing CO2 emissions.

 

" What this underscores is that it's what we invest in now and in the

next 20 years that will deliver a stable climate, not what we do in the

middle of the century or later, " said Tom Burke, a former government

adviser on green issues who now advises business.

 

The report starkly spells out the likely consequences of exceeding the

threshold. " Beyond the 2 degrees C level, the risks to human societies

and ecosystems grow significantly, " it says.

 

" It is likely, for example, that average-temperature increases larger

than this will entail substantial agricultural losses, greatly increased

numbers of people at risk of water shortages, and widespread adverse

health impacts. [They] could also imperil a very high proportion of the

world's coral reefs and cause irreversible damage to important

terrestrial ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest. "

 

It goes on: " Above the 2 degrees level, the risks of abrupt,

accelerated, or runaway climate change also increase. The possibilities

include reaching climatic tipping points leading, for example, to the

loss of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets (which, between

them, could raise sea level more than 10 metres over the space of a few

centuries), the shutdown of the thermohaline ocean circulation (and,

with it, the Gulf Stream), and the transformation of the planet's

forests and soils from a net sink of carbon to a net source of carbon. "

--

 

 

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