Met Office issues strongest warning yet on climate change

The UK’s largest environmental services provider has issued its strongest warning yet on climate change, in the lead up to the UN climate conference in December.

Research from the Met Office's Hadley Centre warns a three per cent cut on global emissions from 2010 is the only option to avoid the disastrous impact of rising sea levels and drought.

Over 80 countries will meet in December to discuss a new climate change treaty at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNCCC) in Poland. The conference aims to develop the existing Kyoto Protocol and discuss further requirements for a new international treaty next year. However, previous risk assessments of climate change have yielded very little change in policy over the last decade, prompting some scepticism from environmentalists that this year’s summit will not achieve enough.

The Global Climate Campaign has organised a march to coincide with the UNCCC summit on 6 December to raise public awareness of the conference and of climate change issues. Organiser of the ‘D6’ march and sustainable development consultant, Dr Keith Baker said: “We’ve seen a succession of talks that haven’t produced much.”

Dr Baker continued: “the energy consumption of the Bali talks was equivalent to the total annual energy consumption of Chad so we have to start putting these things in perspective.

“Governments can always be more effective and I think we need to work together on this, because we will only make progress when all of the political parties stand up and say we are all going to do this.”

Researchers from the Hadley Centre predicted several possible scenarios based on current global warming trends. In the most optimistic scenario, where emissions were cut by three per cent per year by 2010, global temperatures would rise 1.7ºC by 2050 and 2ºC by 2100.

Current trends, however, show that global emissions are increasing annually, whilst no attempt to acheive an international agreement on curbing the production of greenhouse gases has yet yielded any significant results. Hadley Centre researchers have therefore concluded that a more realistic scenario is a rise of as much as 7ºC by the end of the century, causing irreversible damage.

Vicky Pope, head of the Met Office centre for climatic change research wrote in The Guardian last week: “The latest climate model projections from the Met Office Hadley Centre show clearly that such failures [in carbon reduction] could have worrying and significant consequences for the world's climate.

“Even with large and early cuts in emissions, these projections indicate that temperatures are likely to rise to around 2ºC above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. If action is delayed or is slow, then there is a significant risk of much larger increases in temperature.”

In a forthcoming climate change bill, Gordon Brown has declared his intention to cut carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2050 through changes in power generation, heating, transport and industry.

Though welcomed by environmentalists, the Global Climate Campaign has expressed fears that longsighted plans, exceeding political terms, may be adversely affected by party politics.

Dr Baker said: “There is an issue that climate change is being used as a bit of a political football. You’re dealing with something that’s got implications 40, 50 or 100 years in the future and an election term is four to five year, so we have to understand our limitations in government.”

The D6 march is being organised in over 100 cities including New York, London, Paris, Shanghai and Glasgow.