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Countdown To Global Catastrophe
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, The Independent
The global
warming danger threshold for the world is clearly marked for the first time in
an international report to be published on January 25 -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 time bomb 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."