Recent News
Climate Change, Energy and Planning Acts receive Royal Assent (26th November 2008)
Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, said:
"The UK is the first country in the world to introduce a legally-binding
framework to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Setting the 80 per cent target was
the easy part: now the work really begins. Government, communities, businesses
and individuals need to work together to bring about change."
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Selected Articles
Climate change accelerating far beyond the IPCC forecast, WWF says (Telegraph, 20 October 2008)
Climate change is happening much faster than the world's best scientists
predicted and will wreak havoc unless action is taken on a global scale,
a new report warns.
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Stern warns that climate change is far worse than 2006 estimate (The Independent, 17 April 2008)
Lord Stern, the economist whose report on climate change helped galvanise world leaders behind the green energy movement when it was published 18 months ago, has admitted that the situation is far worse than the assumptions that formed the basis of his ground-breaking report.
"We badly underestimated the degree of damages and the risks of climate change,"
said Lord Stern in a speech in London yesterday. "All of the links in the chain
are on average worse than we thought a couple of years ago."
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Climate target is not radical enough - study
Nasa scientist warns the world must urgently make huge CO2 reductions
(The Guardian, 7 April 2008)
One of the world's leading climate scientists warns today that the EU and its international partners must urgently rethink targets for cutting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of fears they have grossly underestimated the scale of the problem.
In a startling reappraisal of the threat, James Hansen, head of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, calls for a sharp reduction in CO2 limits.
Hansen says the EU target of 550 parts per million of CO2 - the most stringent in the world - should be slashed to 350ppm. He argues the cut is needed if "humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed". A final version of the paper Hansen co-authored with eight other climate scientists, is posted today on the Archive website. Instead of using theoretical models to estimate the sensitivity of the climate, his team turned to evidence from the Earth's history, which they say gives a much more accurate picture.
The team studied core samples taken from the bottom of the ocean, which allow CO2 levels to be tracked millions of years ago. They show that when the world began to glaciate at the start of the Ice age about 35m years ago, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere stood at about 450ppm.
"If you leave us at 450ppm for long enough it will probably melt all the ice - that's a sea rise of 75 metres. What we have found is that the target we have all been aiming for is a disaster - a guaranteed disaster," Hansen told the Guardian.
At levels as high as 550ppm, the world would warm by 6C, the paper finds.
Previous estimates had suggested warming would be just 3C at that point.
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Other Articles
A steep road to climate stabilization
(Nature, 17 January 2008)
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Analysis: IPCC issues dire climate change warning
(New Scientist, 22 November 2007)
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Brown sets tough targets for reducing carbon
PM's first environment speech warns of hard choices ahead
(The Guardian, 20 November 2007)
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