Scientists beg for climate action

Seth Borenstein, Associated Press, Yahoo News 6 Dec 07;

For the first time, more than 200 of the world's leading climate scientists, losing their patience, urged government leaders to take radical action to slow global warming because "there is no time to lose."

A petition from at least 215 climate scientists calls for the world to cut in half greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It is directed at a conference of diplomats meeting in Bali, Indonesia, to negotiate the next global warming treaty. The petition, obtained by The Associated Press, is to be announced at a press conference there Wednesday night.

The appeal from scientists follows a petition last week from more than 150 global business leaders also demanding the 50 percent cut in greenhouse gases.

That is the estimate that scientists calculate would hold future global warming to a little more than a 3-degree Fahrenheit increase and is in line with what the European Union has adopted.

In the past, many of these scientists have avoided calls for action, leaving that to environmental advocacy groups. That dispassionate stance was taken during the release this year of four separate reports by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But no more.

"It's a grave crisis, and we need to do something real fast," said petition signer Jeff Severinghaus, a geosciences professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. "I think the stakes are way way too high to be playing around."

The unprecedented petition includes scientists from more than 25 countries and shows that "the climate science community is essentially fed up," said signer Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria in Canada. It includes many co-authors of the intergovernmental climate change panel reports, directors of major American and European climate science research institutions, a Nobel winner for atmospheric chemistry and a winner of a MacArthur "genius" award.

"A lot of us scientists think the problem needs a lot more serious attention than it's getting and the remedies have to be a lot more radical," said Richard Seager, a scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

The organizers of the petition — two Australians, two Germans and an American — would not comment about their efforts before their 11 p.m. EST press conference. But several scientists who signed on talked of losing patience.

"Action needs to be taken and needs to be taken now," said Marika Holland, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who signed on. "The longer we wait, the worse it's going to become."

Negotiators in Bali are working on the initial groundwork for a treaty that would take effect after 2012, the expiration date of the Kyoto Protocol, a climate treat the United States didn't sign. However, no on expects concrete results at the closed-door sessions.

NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt, who signed the petition, said "the time for half-measures and the time for voluntary agreements and the time for arguing about 1 percent here and 1 percent there — those things are no longer relevant."

Schmidt noted while scientists have been dismissed by some as unrealistic, the call for a 50 percent emissions cut by business leaders "helps give credence to the idea that it's achievable."

Policy analysts, who weren't part of either petition, split on how meaningful the two petitions are.

What's happening is people are agreeing "that the cost of inaction is on the high side and the cost of action is affordable," said Joseph Romm, a policy analyst at the liberal think-tank Center for American Progress, energy business consultant and trained physicist.

But Jerry Taylor, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute said "scientists are in no position to intelligently guide public policy on climate change." Scientists can lay out scenarios, but it is up to economists to weigh the costs and benefits and many of them say the costs of cutting emissions are higher than the benefits, he said.

Granger Morgan, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, said he sees "a growing realization among a wide variety of players that we've got to stop talking about this and start some action." But, he added, "I'm not going to hold my breath that we're going to get anything."

The declaration: http://www.climate.unsw.edu.au/bali/

Scientists demand swift climate action at Bali meet
David Fogarty Yahoo News 6 Dec 07;

Climate scientists from around the world urged delegates at U.N.-led talks in Bali on Thursday to make deeper and swifter cuts to greenhouse emissions to prevent dangerous global warming.

In a declaration, more than 200 scientists said governments had a window of only 10-15 years for global emissions to peak and decline, and that the ultimate goal should be at least a 50 percent reduction in climate-warming emissions by 2050.

"We appreciate this is a significant challenge for the world community," Professor Andy Pittman, from the University of New South Wales in Australia, told reporters in Bali.

"But it is what is required to reduce the risks of dangerous climate change, and that is what we are all trying to do here."

The meeting in Bali, involving about 190 nations, aims to initiate a two-year dialogue leading to a broader climate pact by 2009 to replace or upgrade the Kyoto Protocol.

The goal is to find a formula that will bring outsiders such as the United States, China and India into a global compact to fight growing emissions of carbon dioxide, which is produced from burning fossil fuels in power stations, industry and transport.

The United States, the world's top carbon emitter, has come under intense pressure from all sides at the Bali meeting to curb its emissions and on Wednesday U.S. lawmakers moved a step closer to approving caps.

A Senate committee approved legislation outlining a cap-and-trade system for industry, power generators and transport. The bill is headed for debate in the full Senate.

"The United States simply has to take a leadership role," Senator John Warner, a Virginia Republican and the bill's co-sponsor told the committee.

"We are the superpower in the world and we've got to utilize our status to try and help correct a situation I think all of us acknowledge is causing hardships ... that are really without precedent."

TIME TO ACT

President George W. Bush pulled America out of the Kyoto Protocol saying it threatened the economy and unfairly excluded big developing nations such as China and India from binding emissions cuts.

In turn, China and India say rich nations must do more to cut emissions and that caps would hurt their economies as they try to lift millions out of poverty.

"If we don't act, China and India will simply hide behind America's skirts of inaction," Warner said.

A group of U.S. scientists in Bali welcomed the committee's move. "This is a very welcome development. It shows the increasing isolation of the U.S. administration," said Alden Meyer of the U.S. Union of Concerned Scientists.

Professor Diana Liverman of Britain's Oxford University said the world was already seeing substantial impacts from global warming, but a warming of 2 degrees Celsius would have severe impacts in Africa, Australia, the polar regions and the Pacific Islands.

The U.N. climate panel, which released a series of reports on climate change this year, says the world is at risk from rapidly melting glaciers, vanishing sea ice and loss of icesheets.

Polar bears have become an iconic symbol of climate change because the area of Arctic sea ice they rely for hunting has shrunk to record lows during the summer.

Outside the Bali conference centre, eight activists dressed as polar bears added a twist to the climate debate by holding banners reading: "Humans need help too."

Separately, the WWF conservation group said that 55 percent of the Amazon rain forest could be wiped out or severely damaged by 2030 by a "vicious feedback loop of climate change and deforestation."

It said the effects of warming could cut rainfall and aggravate current trends in farming, fires, droughts and logging in the world's largest tropical forest.

The Amazon's forests are a giant store of carbon dioxide -- trees soak up the main greenhouse gas as they grow and release it when they rot or are burnt.

(Additional reporting by Alister Doyle in Bali, Deborah Zabarenko in Washington and James Grubel in Canberra; editing by Jeremy Laurence)