Global warming must stay below 2C or world faces ruin, scientists declare

via JON SUMBY

World carbon emissions must start to decline in only six years if humanity is to stand a chance of preventing dangerous global warming, a group of 20 Nobel prize-winning scientists, economists and writers declared today.

The United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen in December must agree to halve greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 to stop temperatures from increasing by more than 2C (3.6F), the St James’s Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium concluded.

While even a 2C temperature rise will have adverse consequences, a bigger increase would create “unmanageable climate risks”, according to the St James’s Palace memorandum, signed today by 20 Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, economics, peace and literature.

The temperature target “can only be achieved with a peak of global emissions of all greenhouse gases by 2015”, the document said. If emissions continue to rise after that date, the required cuts would become unachievable. Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Postdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, a convenor of the symposium, likened the urgency for action on climate change to the threat of thermonuclear weapons during the Cold War.

“We are facing a crisis as deep as the arms race of the 1950s and 1960s and the Cold War notion of mutually assured destruction,” he said. “Today we have mutually assured increases in greenhouse gases.”

Full story at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6380709.ece

Read the memorandum at: http://extras.timesonline.co.uk/pdfs/sjp_memorandum_290509.pdf

Watch the video about the declaration, ‘We can’t go slow, we must go fast [on reducing emissions]’: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6380709.ece