Leaders from about 180 nations are locked in a two-year round of talks aimed at crafting a global pact to fight climate change by reducing carbon dioxide that is lofted into the skies.
Greenhouse gases threaten to accelerate warming to levels that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said last year will increase floods and droughts, raise sea levels and extinguish thousands of species.
“It’s been all talk and until there’s action, emissions will continue to go up,” Martin Parry, who last year co-chaired one of the panel’s three working groups, said yesterday in a telephone interview from his home in eastern England.
“The window of opportunity we have in order to achieve an international agreement and act upon it is beginning to close. We have potentially serious damage in store,” he said.
Emissions need to peak by 2015 and drop by 50 percent by 2050 to limit warming to 2°C more than the level before the Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century, the UN panel proposed.
Global talks aim to close a deal at a conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen in December next year.
With emissions currently tracking the high end of scenarios examined by the UN, temperatures may rise as much as 6.3°C by 2100, said Le Quere, a member of the GCP’s steering committee.
That would make the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet inevitable, with enough water to raise sea levels by about 7m, she said.
“Things are happening very, very fast,” Le Quere said. “We already know this is a huge problem but the actions that are taken now are extremely important in determining the rate of warming.”
The pact being discussed at the global talks will replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Under that agreement, 37 developed countries agreed to cut emissions from 1990 levels by a combined 5 percent by 2012.
The largest emitter, the US, never signed Kyoto, and developing countries did not set targets.
Developed countries are responsible for 80 percent of historic emissions and it’s up to them to take the lead in slashing output of the gas, Le Quere said. “This is a reality check of what’s actually happening: The industrialized countries have to cut their emissions much, much faster than they are doing now.” she said.
“There’s a lot of effort to curb emissions of CO2 but the scale is not big enough. It has to be on a much, much larger scale. The scale of the problem is enormous,” she said.
RSS