- LONDON (Reuters) -- The world
faces a surge in extreme weather events because of global warming and governments
must act immediately to avert disaster, Britain's chief scientist said
on Tuesday.
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- "Already we are witnessing increased storms at sea
and floods in our cities," David King said. "Global warming will
increase the level and frequency at which we experience heightened weather
patterns.
-
- "Action is affordable. Inaction is not," he
told the third Greenpeace Business Lecture in central London.
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- King said levels of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide,
were at their highest ever and rising due primarily to the burning of fossil
fuels at an unprecedented rate.
-
- His comments came a day after scientists at Britain's
Hadley Center revealed that CO2 levels in the atmosphere had risen in the
past two years, prompting fears that catastrophic climate change could
be out of control.
-
- However, although the CO2 spike had been registered across
the world, scientists cautioned that it was too early to tell if it was
an anomaly or if climate change had entered a new, explosive phase.
-
- "CO2 levels are up about two ppm (parts per million)
in the past two years -- but it would be pushing it to say that it could
be the start of runaway global warming," Kim Holmen at the Norwegian
Institute for Air Research said.
-
- Environment pressure group Greenpeace said King had sounded
an alarm that could not go unnoticed.
-
- "All political and business leaders now have a moral
duty to respond to what is clearly an emergency," Greenpeace's executive
Stephen Tindale said.
-
- The Kyoto treaty on cutting CO2 emissions by 5.2 percent
below 1990 levels by 2012 is expected to come into force within months
with crucial Russian backing after the United States refusal to endorse
the treaty in 2001 led to years of delays.
-
- But scientists are divided on the treaty's efficacy and
environmentalists say it is far too little, too late.
-
- King insisted he was optimistic.
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- "We now understand what is happening and therefore
what we must do to address this -- global action to reduce carbon emissions
is the key," he said.
-
- It was not just cars and the boom in air travel that
were the culprits; power stations and factories are pumping out greenhouse
gases, and coal and wood remain the main sources of heat and light across
large parts of the globe.
-
- King's warning echoed that by fellow British scientist
Mike Pilling of Leeds University, speaking at the British Association for
the Advancement of Science annual meeting last month.
-
- He warned that the escalation of hurricanes and heat
waves would trigger an epidemic of premature deaths and urged governments
to come up with a holistic solution rather than trying to pick off culprits
one at a time.
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- http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=scienceNews&storyID=6480357
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