Global warming to speed up -- but is it dangerous?
Source: Reuters
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO, Jan 26 (Reuters) - A draft U.N. report projecting a big rise in temperatures this century is likely to add fuel to the debate about whether the world is facing dangerous global warming, experts said on Friday. The draft, by 2,500 scientists and due for release in Paris on Feb. 2, is expected to warn of more heat waves, floods, droughts and rising seas linked to greenhouse gases released mainly by burning fossil fuels, scientific sources say. World leaders, including former U.S. President George Bush, signed a U.N. Climate Convention in 1992 with an overriding goal of stabilising greenhouse gases at levels preventing "dangerous (human) interference with the climate system". However, it did not define "dangerous" and the issue has been a vexed point in efforts to slow climate change ever since. "The new report should fuel the debate" among scientists and in the media, said Jan Corfee-Morlot, who heads work on climate change at the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). "For politicians, the question of what is dangerous is not formally on a negotiating agenda, but it is in the background." The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is expected to predict a temperature rise of 2 to 4.5 degrees Celsius (3.5-8 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels by 2100 with a "best estimate" of a rise of 3 degrees C (5.5 F), scientific sources said. That is a narrower range than the 1.4-5.8C (2.5-10.4F) in the previous IPCC report in 2001 -- even the minimum 1.4 rise would be the biggest in a century for 10,000 years. Temperatures have risen about 0.6C (1.1F) since 1900. SLOWER SEA RISE Among good news, the new report will narrow and revise down forecast sea rises this century to less than half a metre from 9 cm to 88 cm (3.5-34.5 inches) in the 2001 report. The European Union and many environmental groups want the world to cap any rise in temperatures at 2 degrees C (3.6 F) over pre-industrial levels, saying such a rise would cause dangerous changes to nature such as more heat waves. "The IPCC cannot say what is dangerous because that is a political judgment," said Bert Metz, a climate expert at the Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency. "But it gives the ingredients for the politicians to draw conclusions...as the EU has done." Corfee-Morlot said it might be easier to set targets such as limiting the concentrations of carbon dioxide or temperature rises than to define dangerous benchmarks. Inuit peoples say a melting of the Arctic ice is already "dangerous" for their hunting culture, for instance, while Russia might benefit from a slight rise in temperatures because of fewer deaths from cold and higher yields of some crops. A 2006 report by Nicholas Stern, the chief British government economist, projected a rise of 3 C would mean that between 1 billion and 4 billion more people would suffer water shortages and put an extra 150 million to 550 million people at risk of hunger. Other experts say the risks have been exaggerated. "I don't think the IPCC will reflect the sense of catastrophe that has built up in the climate change debate," said Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist". Under the Kyoto Protocol, the U.N. plan for fighting global warming, 35 industrial nations have agreed to cut emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. President George W. Bush pulled the United States out of the protocol in 2001, saying it would damage the U.S. economy and wrongly exempted developing nations from the first phase.
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