Scientists present climate plan to UN

An international panel of scientists has presented the United Nations with a sweeping, detailed plan to combat climate change – a challenge, it said, “to which civilisation must rise”.

Failure would produce a turbulent 21st century of weather extremes, spreading drought and disease, expanding oceans and displaced coastal populations, it said.

“The increasing numbers of environmental refugees as sea levels rise and storm surges increase will be in the tens of millions,” panel co-chair Rosina Bierbaum, a University of Michigan ecologist, told reporters.

After a two-year study, the 18-member group, representing 11 nations, offered scores of recommendations: from pouring billions more dollars into research and development of cleaner energy sources, to mobilising UN and other agencies to help affected people, to winning political agreement on a global temperature “ceiling”.

Their 166-page report, produced at UN request and sponsored by the private United Nations Foundation and the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society, was issued just three weeks after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an authoritative UN network of 2,000 scientists, made headlines with its latest assessment of climate science.

The IPCC expressed its greatest confidence yet that global warming is being caused largely by the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, mostly from man’s burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels. If nothing’s done, it said, global temperatures could rise as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.

Temperatures rose an average 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 100 years. Yesterday’s report said the world’s nations should agree to limit further rises this century to no more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Beyond that, “we would be in a regime where the danger of intolerable and unmanageable impacts on human well-being would rise very rapidly,” said panel member John Holdren, director of Massachusetts’ Woods Hole Research Centre.

The experts panel said global carbon dioxide emissions should be levelled off by 2015-2020, and then cut back to less than one-third that level by 2100, via a vast transformation of global energy systems – toward greater efficiency, away from fossil fuels, and toward biofuels, solar, wind and other renewable energy sources.

That changeover would be spurred by heavy “carbon taxes” or “cap-and-trade” systems, whereby industries’ emissions are capped by governments, and more efficient companies can sell unused allowances to less efficient ones.