http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1013639,00.html
World to warm
by 8C, says thinktank
Paul Brown, environment
correspondent
Thursday August 7, 2003
The Guardian
Latest predictions
show that climate change is going to be far worse
than earlier forecasts and that Labour's drastic aim of a 60%
cut
in carbon dioxide emissions for the UK may not be enough, says
the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR)
The leading leftwing
thinktank examines the next steps beyond
the Kyoto agreement under which the UK has agreed to cut its
greenhouse gas emissions by 12.5% and the EU by 8%. But runaway
global warming is likely unless the US, the world's biggest
polluter can be persuaded to take the issue seriously,
the report says.
Geoff Jenkins, the
head of the climate prediction programme
at the Hadley Centre for Climate Change, says that when soil
inevitably starts to break down, it releases the carbon
stored in the last 150 years - thus increasing the rate
of global warming.
Scientists predict
temperatures to rise 5C in the northern
hemisphere by 2100. The new calculations show it could be 8C.
Scientists believe this would be disastrous, and to prevent
even higher rises developed countries must cut emissions
by 80%.
In the same paper,
Sir Tom Blundell, chairman of the royal
commission on environmental pollution, argues that every
country would be allocated a share of the maximum amount
of carbon that could be safely emitted to the atmosphere.
This means that countries
such as India would be allowed
a small overall rise in emissions but that Europe and
North America would have to impose drastic cuts to achieve
fair shares for all.
This approach is seen
as a way of getting the US and
Australia back into international agreements because
every country in the world, including India and China,
would have limits imposed.
Kyoto delivers only
a 1-2% cut in emissions from industrial
nations while total global emissions rise 70%. The IPPR call
for a new approach comes as Kyoto members begin a review
of existing pledges.
Tony Grayling, IPPR
associate director, said: "The next
international climate change negotiations must agree on
a safe level of emissions in the long term and fair shares
between nations ... Climate change policy should be based
on sound science and social justice, not the horse trading
that characterised the negotiations for the Kyoto protocol."
