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Urgent action needed on climate change, scientist says

Global temperatures will rise by an average of 3oC due to climate change and cause catastrophic damage around the world unless governments take urgent action, according to the UK government's chief scientist.

In a stark warning issued on Friday, David King said that a rise of this magnitude would cause famine and drought and threaten millions of lives.

It would also cause a worldwide drop in cereal crops of between 20 million and 400 million tonnes, put 400 million more people at risk of hunger, and put up to 3 billion people at risk of flooding and without access to fresh water supplies.

Few ecosystems would be able to adapt to such a temperature change, equivalent to a level of carbon dioxide (CO2) of 550 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere, which would result in the destruction of half the world's nature reserves and a fifth of coastal wetlands.

Many of King's predictions come from a report published by the UK's Hadley Center, a world leader in climate change modeling, called Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change.

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair wants governments around the world to set a target of a rise of no more than 2oC -- equivalent to 450ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere -- in global temperatures.

This has already been agreed as an upper limit by the EU, but King said that this agreement would be difficult, given the refusal of the US to cut emissions and those of China and India rising as those countries develop.

Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, said that despondency was not the answer.

"US President George W. Bush won't be in office forever. When he's gone there will be a change of policy inside the US," Juniper said.

King said in an interview that the government would not go into any future negotiations with its mind already made up.

"Our position back in 2003 was that we must aim to get global agreement to keep levels below 550ppm," he added.

"The science has moved on since then and we're now aware that even 550ppm poses the impacts of dangerous climate change," he said.
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