2C climate rise seen as ceiling
World leaders must commit to limit at UN summit to avoid disasters, scientists warn
World leaders must commit themselves to holding current rises in global temperatures to 2C. That is the stark message of experts and campaigners in the run-up to the United Nations climate summit in New York later this week.
They say 2C is the maximum temperature increase the world can tolerate without causing environmental mayhem, and they insist politicians attending the meeting, including US President Barack Obama, must agree to that upper limit.
“If Obama and the others decide that 2C has to be the limit, then negotiators will subsequently find it so much easier to hammer out a framework for curtailing carbon dioxide emissions over the next year,” said British economist and climate expert Nicholas Stern, who will be attending the meeting.
“If they have a specific goal — a 2C limit — then that will make it so much easier to design carbon emission limits for different countries,” he said.
The meeting in New York has been called by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon to kickstart the full-scale carbon emission negotiations scheduled for 2015. These are intended to culminate in official talks in Paris next year when it is hoped a framework will be hammered out for limiting carbon emissions over the following three decades.
“More than 120 world leaders are going to attend the conference in New York, and that will be extraordinarily important in setting the agenda for the Paris talks,” said Stern. “If those leaders agree to that temperature limit, the decision will open up all sorts of negotiating avenues.”
Scientists say humans poured around 1950 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — by burning fossil fuels — over the last 200 years. If that reaches 3670 billion tonnes, they add, it will be hard to avoid a 2C rise in global temperatures that would trigger devastating changes to the climate, including major rises in sea levels, the melting of icecaps, droughts in Africa, America and Asia, storms and ocean acidification. At present
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