Deep climate cuts urged; food price a wake-up call
Pastor Dale Morgan
*Deep climate cuts urged; food price a wake-up call*
29 May 2008 17:00:01 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
OSLO, May 29 (Reuters) - Governments will have to cut greenhouse gases
far more deeply than planned to control global warming and high food
prices linked to droughts are a wake-up call, four leading scientists
said on Thursday.
"We have lost 10 years talking about climate change but not acting on
it," the experts, led by Britain's Martin Parry who is a co-chair of a
U.N. Climate Panel group on the impacts of climate change, wrote in the
journal Nature.
They said there was "false optimism" about easy fixes.
By 2050, global emissions would have to be cut by 80 percent of the 1990
levels -- well beyond the 50 percent target under consideration for a
July summit in Japan by the Group of Eight industrial nations.
"We are now probably witnessing the first genuinely global effects of
greenhouse gas warming," they wrote of high food prices partly caused by
droughts, for instance in major grains producer Australia, and by a
drive to produce biofuels on farm land.
"This should serve as a wake-up call," they said. More than 190 nations
have agreed to work out a new long-term treaty by the end of 2009 to
combat climate change to succeed the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol.
Cuts in emissions and efforts to adapt to the impacts of a changing
climate "will need to be much stronger than currently planned if
dangerous global impacts of climate change are to be avoided," they wrote.
Their study showed that even a 50 percent cut in world emissions by
2050, the most stringent goal considered by G8, was too little to avert
dangerous impacts such as water shortages and rising seas even with
further cuts at the same pace to 2100.
"Limiting impacts to acceptable levels by mid-century and beyond would
require an 80 per cent cut in global emissions by 2050," they wrote.
G8 environment ministers meeting in Japan last weekend urged leaders at
a summit in July to set a global target of halving greenhouse gases by
2050, a goal favoured last year by all G8 nations except the United
States and Russia.
President George W. Bush announced a policy last month, however, that
will let U.S. emissions keep rising until 2025.
"The picture is much bleaker and I'm much less optimistic than I was,"
Parry told Reuters. A continued rise in emissions by the United States,
the top emitter with China, would make deep cuts by mid-century ever
more difficult, he said.
An 80 percent cut in emissions levels would limit a rise in global
temperatures to 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels,
a level viewed by the European Union as a threshold for "dangerous"
changes, the study said.
Parry noted that contenders to succeed Bush -- Republican John McCain
and Democratic hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton -- favoured
U.S. cuts of 50 percent by 2050. That was too little when developed
nations had to lead the way, he said.
The scientists said they were writing their personal opinions. Parry
said he would not seek re-election to the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change in September so could write more freely.
-- For Reuters latest environment blogs click on:
http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/ (Editing by Jon Boyle)