‘Greenhouse Gases Hit Danger Mark’
SYDNEY: The global economic boom has accelerated greenhouse gas emissions to a dangerous threshold not expected for a decade and could potentially cause irreversible climate change, said one of Australia’s leading scientists.
Tim Flannery, a world recognised climate change scientist and Australian of the Year in 2007, said a UN international climate change report due in November will show that greenhouse gases have already reached a dangerous level.
Flannery said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report will show that greenhouse gas in the atmosphere in mid-2005 had reached about 455 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent — a level not expected for another 10 years.
“We thought we’d be at that threshold within about a decade,” Flannery said on an Australian television late on Monday. “We thought we had that much time. But the new data indicates that in about mid-2005 we crossed that threshold,” he said.
“What the report establishes is that the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is already above the threshold that could potentially cause dangerous climate change,” he said.
Flannery said he had seen the raw data which will be in the IPCC Synthesis Report. He said the measurement of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere included not just carbon dioxide, but also nitrous oxide, methane and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). All these gases were measured and then equated into potentially one gas to reach a general level. “They’re all having an impact. Probably 75 percent is carbon dioxide but the rest is that mixed bag of other gases,” he said.
Flannery said global economic expansion, particularly in China and India, was a major factor behind the unexpected acceleration in greenhouse gas levels.
The report adds an urgency to international climate change talks on the Indonesian island of Bali in December as reducing greenhouse gas emissions may no longer be enough to prevent dangerous climate change, he said. UN environment ministers meet in December in Bali to start talks on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol on curbing climate change that expires in 2012.
Flannery suggested the developed world could buy “climate security” by paying villages in countries like Papua New Guinea not to log forests and to regrow forests.
“That 200 gigatonnes of carbon pollutant, the standing stock that’s in the atmosphere, is there courtesy of the industrial revolution,” he said.
Source: The Telegraph (Kolkata, India)
[...] ‘Greenhouse Gases Hit Danger Mark’ by paying villages in countries like Papua New Guinea not to log forests and to regrow forests… Australian television late on Monday. We thought we had that much time. But the new data indicates [...]