Alaska to get British-style temperatures - study
Source: Reuters
By Jeremy Lovell LONDON, Jan 19 (Reuters) - Parts of the world could heat up by over 10 degrees Celsius (18 Fahrenheit) this century with big areas becoming uninhabitable, according to a climate prediction experiment. "We are very rapidly heading back towards the greenhouse world of the dinosaurs," Bob Spicer, one of the scientists who mounted the joint BBC/Oxford University study, said on Friday. "Back then northern Alaska had mean annual temperatures of about the same level as we have in London -- about 10 degrees (C)." Most scientists agree average world temperatures will rise 2 to 6 degrees C this century, mainly because of carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels for power and transport, putting millions of lives at risk from flood and famine. A draft report by 2,500 scientists of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sees world temperatures rising 2.0-4.5 C (3.6-8.1 F) by 2100 unless greenhouse gas emissions from factories, cars and power plants are cut radically, informed sources told Reuters on Friday. The British experiment used computer projections to plot the global climate from 1920 to 2080 -- long enough for the results to be statistically significant. Initial results are on the www.bbc.co.uk/climatechange website. Projections for Britain will be released on Sunday and full results will be published later in science journal Nature. Coloured maps of the world results seen by Reuters show a splash of red, meaning rises of at least 10 C, across the whole Arctic region by 2050. By the 2070s this red stain has spread south into northern Siberia and Alaska. "While other places will become uninhabitable, these places will become more habitable," Spicer said. For the study some 50,000 people downloaded a climate prediction programme to run on their home computers. Each programme was slightly different, so that a very broad range of possible outcomes was covered. The IPCC's report due out next month will include input from the Oxford team. The experiment's details for Britain show average temperatures up 1.2 C from 1970s levels by the 2020s rising to 2.5 degrees by the 2050s and four degrees by the 2070s. "In the UK alone, by 2020 we will see the same sort of change that we have seen since the 1970s. The acceleration is massive," Spicer said. The European Union has said that even a 2 C rise would tip the world into "dangerous" climate change.
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