- Ten leading US climate scientists spoke on Tuesday of
the need for more urgent action to tackle global warming.
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- They warned that climate models might have grossly underestimated
the rises in temperature that will soon occur.
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- The team called for a major shift to cleaner fuel technologies
to constrain the rapid growth in greenhouse gases.
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- "We're in the middle of a large, uncontrolled experiment
on the only planet we have," said Don Kennedy, the editor-in-chief
of Science magazine.
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- "Global warming has taken place and at our present
rate of doing business, there is going to be a lot more of it and it will
have serious consequences," added the co-organiser of the open gathering
of researchers in Washington DC.
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- Room for doubt?
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- The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established
by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment
Programme, has reported a 0.6C rise in the Earth's mean global surface
temperature during the 20th Century - with a much greater rise expected
in the coming decades.
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- The researchers, who met at the American Association
for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), urged US policymakers and the public
not to get hung up on the uncertainties that still surrounded climate science
- and not to use gaps in knowledge as an excuse for inaction.
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- "A combination of the models and the data, including
the deep-past climate records, are really pretty convincing that if you
increase the carbon dioxide (CO2) levels from today's values of 370 parts
per million to a 1,000 ppm - which we are going to do within the next 150
years without a doubt - it is going to be a very different world,"
said David Battisti, from the University of Washington in Seattle.
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- "There are good reasons to believe the projections
from the models that we have now are actually underestimating the changes."
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- Michael Oppenheimer, from Princeton University, added:
"The overall message is that the science has been pointing in the
same direction for a long time now; and it's time for politicians to sit
up, take notice and actually start to act on the problem, as political
leaders are doing in other parts of the world."
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- Time demand
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- President George Bush has pulled away from the global
climate initiative, known as the Kyoto Protocol, designed to limit the
emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2.
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- The White House believes the treaty would gravely damage
the US economy.
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- The administration would prefer to see gas emissions
cut not by what it calls the "command and control" of Kyoto,
but by voluntary action and development of new energy technologies such
as hydrogen-powered fuel cells.
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- "Because of the time and resources needed to shift
to energies and technologies so that you can avoid 1,000 parts per million,
you need to start doing things now," Michael Oppenheimer said.
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- Daniel Schrag, of Harvard University, added that taking
precautionary measures now could be viewed as a sort of insurance, "because
we have a risk of catastrophe in the future and we have to make an investment
in our energy technologies.
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- "The catastrophe may never happen but that's not
why you buy insurance; you buy insurance against the possibility that it
might happen."
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- The other researchers at the AAAS meeting were Joyce
Penner, from the University of Michigan; Thomas Crowley, of Duke University;
Richard Alley, from Pennsylvania State University; Jerry Meehl, of the
National Center for Atmospheric Research; Lonnie Thompson, from Ohio State
University; and Chris Field, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
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- © BBC MMIV http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3810291.stm
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