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 | | From: | Steven L. Robinson | | Subject: | [progchat_action] Global warming approaching point of no return | | Date: | Sat, 22 Jan 2005 21:59:41 -0500 |
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 | Global warming approaching point of no return, warns leading climate expert
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
23 January 2005
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=603752
Global warning has already hit the danger point that international attempts
to curb it are designed to avoid, according to the world's top climate
watchdog.
Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC), told an international conference attended by 114
governments in Mauritius this month that he personally believes that the
world has "already reached the level of dangerous concentrations of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere" and called for immediate and "very deep" cuts in
the pollution if humanity is to "survive".
His comments rocked the Bush administration - which immediately tried to
slap him down - not least because it put him in his post after Exxon, the
major oil company most opposed to international action on global warming,
complained that his predecessor was too "aggressive" on the issue.
A memorandum from Exxon to the White House in early 2001 specifically asked
it to get the previous chairman, Dr Robert Watson, the chief scientist of
the World Bank, "replaced at the request of the US". The Bush administration
then lobbied other countries in favour of Dr Pachauri - whom the former
vice-president Al Gore called the "let's drag our feet" candidate, and got
him elected to replace Dr Watson, a British-born naturalised American, who
had repeatedly called for urgent action.
But this month, at a conference of Small Island Developing States on the
Indian Ocean island, the new chairman, a former head of India's Tata Energy
Research Institute, himself issued what top United Nations officials
described as a "very courageous" challenge.
He told delegates: "Climate change is for real. We have just a small window
of opportunity and it is closing rather rapidly. There is not a moment to
lose."
Afterwards he told The Independent on Sunday that widespread dying of coral
reefs, and rapid melting of ice in the Arctic, had driven him to the
conclusion that the danger point the IPCC had been set up to avoid had
already been reached.
Reefs throughout the world are perishing as the seas warm up: as water
temperatures rise, they lose their colours and turn a ghostly white. Partly
as a result, up to a quarter of the world's corals have been destroyed.
And in November, a multi-year study by 300 scientists concluded that the
Arctic was warming twice as fast as the rest of the world and that its
ice-cap had shrunk by up to 20 per cent in the past three decades.
The ice is also 40 per cent thinner than it was in the 1970s and is expected
to disappear altogether by 2070. And while Dr Pachauri was speaking parts of
the Arctic were having a January "heatwave", with temperatures eight to nine
degrees centigrade higher than normal.
He also cited alarming measurements, first reported in The Independent on
Sunday, showing that levels of carbon dioxide (the main cause of global
warming) have leapt abruptly over the past two years, suggesting that
climate change may be accelerating out of control.
He added that, because of inertia built into the Earth's natural systems,
the world was now only experiencing the result of pollution emitted in the
1960s, and much greater effects would occur as the increased pollution of
later decades worked its way through. He concluded: "We are risking the
ability of the human race to survive."
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