UN expert warns of global warming dangers and costs

THE UN’s top climate scientist has cautioned climate negotiators that global warming is leading to human dangers and soaring financial costs, but containing carbon emissions will have a host of benefits.

Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, summarised a litany of potential disasters at a UN climate conference in the South African city of Durban.

Although he gave no explicit deadlines, he warned time is running out for greenhouse gas emissions to level off and begin to decline.

Heat waves currently experienced once every 20 years will happen every other year by the end of this century, he said.

Coastal areas and islands are threatened with inundation by global warming, rain-reliant agriculture in Africa will shrink by half and many species will disappear. Within a decade, up to 250 million more people will face the stress of scarce water.

Increasingly frequent weather disasters have imposed heavy financial burdens, with some poor countries running up 90% of their national debt to deal with the aftermath of storms, droughts and floods, he said.

But the Indian scientist said “many impacts can be avoided, reduced or delayed” by reducing emissions.

To stabilise carbon concentrations in the atmosphere would slow economic growth by 0.12% per year, he said, but those costs would be offset by improved health, greater energy security and more secure food supplies.

Meanwhile, a European drive to forge a legally-binding deal that would break the deadlock at the world climate talks is struggling to gain traction.

The scheme has come under fire from both China and the US, the world’s two largest carbon emitters.

But it is also being attacked by poorer nations, which are calling for a more rapid ramping up of pledges from rich countries on carbon-cutting and finance.

Under the European scheme, all the world’s major greenhouse gas emitters would agree in principle to conclude a binding pact by 2015 and to implement it by no later than 2020.

“We think delaying action is costly and dangerous. We have to act now, we need to up our level of effort,” said the European Union’s top negotiator, Artur Runge-Metzger.

A raft of recent scientific reports have shown that the window of opportunity for preventing the planet from dangerously overheating is shrinking fast, he said.

As a quid pro quo, the EU says it is willing to renew CO2-reduction pledges under the embattled Kyoto Protocol, whose first round of cuts expires next year.

Developing countries have come into the meeting held under the 194-nation UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) demanding that Kyoto be kept alive.

But other key actors in the climate drama — each for their own reasons, expressed or not — have doused the EU plan with a cold shower.

“I exchanged views with my European colleagues before I came here and told them very clearly that a mandate is too much,” Li Gao, a senior climate negotiator from China, said on the sidelines of the meeting.

For China, an agreement to hammer out a global climate deal already exists.

The so-called Bali Roadmap in 2007 was supposed to conclude with a planet-saving pact in Copenhagen two years later.

Instead, that meeting deadlocked, barely avoiding collapse by producing an 11th-hour agreement that fell far short of the intended goal.