- Measures to fight global warming will have to be at least
four times stronger than the Kyoto Protocol if they are to avoid the melting
of the polar ice caps, inundating central London and many of the world's
biggest cities, concludes a new official report.
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- The report, by a German government body, says that even
if it is fully implemented, the protocol will only have a "marginal
attenuating effect" on the climate change. But last week even this
was thrown into doubt amid contradictory signals from the Russian government
as to whether it will allow the treaty to come into effect.
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- Global warming already kills 150,000 people a year worldwide
and the rate of climate change is soon likely to exceed anything the planet
has seen "in the last million years" says the report, produced
by the German Advisory Council on Global Change for a meeting of the world's
environment ministers to consider the future of the treaty in Milan this
week.
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- It concludes that the protocol must urgently be brought
into force, but only as a first step, insisting that "catastrophic"
climate change "can now only be prevented if climate protection targets
are set at substantially higher levels than those agreed internationally
until now".
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- The report, written by eight leading German professors,
says that "dangerous climatic changes" will become "highly
probable" if the world's average temperature is allowed to increase
to more than 2 degrees centigrade above what it was before the start of
the Industrial Revolution.
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- Beyond that level the West Antarctic ice sheet and the
Greenland ice cap would begin gradually to melt away, eventually raising
sea levels world wide by up to 30 feet, submerging vast areas of land and
key cities worldwide. London, New York, Miami, Bombay, Calcutta, Sydney,
Shanghai, Lagos and Tokyo would be among those largely submerged by such
a rise.
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- Above this mark too, other "devastating" and
"irreversible" changes would be likely to take place. These include
a cessation of the Indian monsoon and the ending of the Gulf Stream, which
would dramatically worsen the climate in Britain and western Europe, even
as the world warms. Another risk is the so-called "runaway greenhouse"
where rising temperatures lead to the release of huge reservoirs methane
stored in permafrost and the oceans, adding to global warming and starting
a self-reinforcing cycle that would eventually make the earth uninhabitable.
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- To avoid such catastrophe, the report says that industrialised
countries will have to cut emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide
by at least 20 per cent by 2020, and by up to 60 per cent by 2050. The
Kyoto Protocol would at best cut them by 5 per cent by 2012, and probably
less, even if it were brought into force and fully implemented.
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- In the meantime the world looks as if it will greatly
exceed the targets. Writing in The Independent on Sunday today, Michael
Meacher, the former environment minister, calculates that global emissions
of greenhouse gases could increase by 75 per cent by 2020, "putting
the world well on the way to doomsday".
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=470838
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