Alister Doyle, Reuters 29 Jan 10;
OSLO (Reuters) - Major nations' plans for fighting climate change under the "Copenhagen Accord" are insufficient to limit average temperature rises to the projected 2 degrees Celsius, a leading expert said on Friday.
The accord, brokered at a summit last month by top emitters led by China and the United States, sets a Jan. 31 deadline for countries to say how far they will curb greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 to help keep temperature rises below 2 degrees.
"From what we see right now, it's far away from 2 degrees," Niklas Hoehne, director of energy and climate policy at climate consultancy Ecofys, told Reuters.
Hoehne said that a projection made in mid-December by Ecofys and partners that world temperatures would rise by 3.5 degrees Celsius was becoming ever more realistic.
Industrialised emitters led by the United States, European Union members, Japan and Australia have all merely reaffirmed emissions goals set before Copenhagen ahead of the Jan. 31 deadline. Developing nations such as China and India have also given no sign of greater ambition.
A problem is that pressure for tougher targets has eased, Hoehne said. "That is the major disappointment after Copenhagen, the pressure to be in line with 2C is not there any more," he said. "What is left is public pressure to do more."
"3.5 degrees of warming has got more likely," he said.
$100 BILLION
The Copenhagen Accord's goal of limiting warming to below 2C above pre-industrial levels is accompanied by goals of giving $10 billion a year to help developing nations cope with climate change from 2010-12, rising to $100 billion a year from 2020.
The WWF environmental group said in a statement that the Sunday deadline was an opportunity for countries to show they were serious about fighting global warming even though Copenhagen disappointed many by failing to agree a U.N. treaty.
For the developed nations "we fear that there is still a gross mismatch between their goal of keeping the world out of climate danger and the steps they are prepared to take," WWF's Kim Carstensen said.
Two degees Celsius is widely viewed by scientists as the threshhold for dangerous change such as more desertification, floods, species extinctions and rising sea levels. Temperatures have already risen 0.7 degrees Celsius in the past century.
A 2007 scenario by the U.N.'s panel of climate scientists, in which Hoehne was a lead author, indicated that developed nations would have to cut emissions by between 25 and 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to limit global warming to 2 degrees.
Promises made up to the Copenhagen summit totalled cuts of 11-19 percent below 1990, the Climate Action Tracker estimates. Washington on Thursday reaffirmed a goal of cutting by 17 percent below 2005 levels, equivalent to 4 percent below 1990.
(Editing by Ralph Boulton)
