Climate report issues wake up call

[HURAKAN]

Climate report issues wake up call
By Katherine Haddon in London

October 31, 2006 12:00

WORLD leaders must act urgently to avert a looming environmental catastrophe, the author of a major British report which sounds a wake-up call on climate change said.

In particular, former World Bank chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern singled out economic powerhouses the US, China and India, major polluters whose backing is crucial for any global solution.

Specifically he said the world must be prepared to pay now to prevent an economic fallout in the future which could be on the scale of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

“There is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we act now and act internationally,” he said, launching a 700-page report in London.

“The task is urgent. Delaying action even by a decade or two will take us into dangerous territory. We must not let this window of opportunity close.”

Source:
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/s ... 06,00.html

[HURAKAN]

Global warming will devastate world economy

Thomas Wagner, Associated Press
Published: Monday, October 30, 2006

LONDON -- Unchecked global warming will devastate the world economy on the scale of the world wars and the Great Depression, a major British report said Monday.

Introducing the report, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said unabated climate change would cost the world between five and 20 per cent of global gross domestic product each year.

He called for "bold and decisive action" to cut carbon emissions and stem the worst of the temperature rise.

Report author Sir Nicholas Stern, a senior government economist, said that acting now to cut greenhouse gas emissions would cost about one per cent of global GDP each year.

"The evidence shows that ignoring climate change will eventually damage economic growth," said Stern's 700-page report, the first major effort to quantify the economic cost of climate change.

"Our actions over the coming decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century," the report said.

Blair said the scientific community agreed that the world was warming, and that greenhouse gas emissions were largely to blame.

"It is not in doubt that, if the science is right, the consequences for our planet are literally disastrous," he said. "Unless we act now, these consequences... will be irreversible."

Stern said the world must shift to a "low-carbon global economy" through measures including taxation, regulation of greenhouse gas emissions and carbon trading.

The report is expected to increase pressure on a number of governments, led by the United States, to step up efforts to fight global warming. The Bush administration never approved the Kyoto climate-change accord while Prime Minister Stephen Harper has rejected the Kyoto emissions-cutting targets as unachievable but he has not formally pulled Canada out of the treaty endorsed by the previous Liberal government.

Instead, the Tories have introduced a new Clear Air Act that sets no short-term targets for cutting greenhouse emissions but aims to cut such pollution by 45 to 65 per cent by 2050. Critics have dismissed the Conservative plan as a "dirty air act" and a "hot air act."

Some critics claim the prime minister is using Canada's position within the treaty to undermine it, acting on behalf of Washington, which has little influence in Kyoto negotiations because the United States is not part of the protocol.

Under the 1997 Kyoto accord, 35 industrialized countries committed to reducing emissions by an average five per cent below 1990 levels by 2012.

But Britain is one of only a handful of industrialized countries whose greenhouse gas emissions have fallen in the last 11/2 decades, the United Nations said Monday.

The UN said Germany's emissions dropped 17 per cent between 1990 and 2004, Britain's by 14 per cent and France's by almost one per cent.

Overall, there was a 2.4 per cent rise in emissions by 41 industrialized countries from 2000 to 2004. That was blamed mostly on former Soviet-bloc countries, whose emissions declined in their economic downturn of the 1990s, then increase by 4.1 per cent during the most recent four-year period.

The British government is considering new "green taxes" on cheap airline flights, fuel and high-emission vehicles.

British Treasury chief Gordon Brown, who commissioned the Stern report, said former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, who has emerged as a powerful environmental spokesman, would advise the government on climate change.

Brown said Britain would lead the international effort against climate change, establishing "an economy that is both pro-growth and pro-green."

He called for Europe to cut its carbon emissions by 30 per cent by 2020 and 60 per cent by 2050.

The British government is considering new "green taxes" on cheap airline flights, fuel and high-emission vehicles.

Source:
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world ... 20&k=23032

[cycloneye]

7. Third-party content. In an effort to prevent plagiarism, we require that any statistics, quotes, news articles, forecasts, and the like obtained from a third party to be posted on storm2k.org must be in the form of a brief quote that cites the original source and/or includes comments by the poster other than the quotation. If you are unsure then just post the link.
ALL POSTS containing copied and pasted material must contain
A. Every Post is to contain a citation of the source.
B. Your interpretation, reaction, or some comment that ADDS VALUE to the pasted information. We are not interested in long copy and paste threads alone.


HURAKAN,I am not thinking that the copy and paste information you posted is not true but for you to not violate rule 7 of storm2k a link to the source has to be posted.

[brunota2003]

Here is a link to the second article through Yahoo: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061030/ap_ ... al_warming

[x-y-no]

I haven't had a chance to look at it yet, but the report is available online here.

[HURAKAN]

Sorry, I forgot!!! It won't happen again!!!

[cycloneye]

Sorry, I forgot!!! It won't happen again!!!

Ok no problem. brunota2003 and x-y-no posted links to that information.

[P.K.]

Various things from the BBC can be found here.

[x-y-no]

Well, I've had a chance to skim thought the Stern report now and I have to say I'm more than a little disappointed in it. The goals of the study are laudable but the actual economic analyses they came up with suffer, I think, from the same flaws as many analyses of the alleged costs of mitigating strategies do - they dont (as far as I can tell) adequately take into account adaptability.

The "now and forever" characterization of the 5 -20 percent GDP cost is absurd on its face. We're nowhere near that level of cost now, nor will we be for some decades at least. And surely, after some period of high cost due to population displacement, agriculture shift, etc. costs will gradually abate again. That situation is serious enough and worthy enough of immediate policy action without resorting to such overstatement, which can only serve as grist for the contrarians.

Also, the stark contrast of costs vs. benefits presented seems to ignore the fact that we're not dealing with a binary either/or situation here, but a continuum of costs/benefits of various mitigation strategies. We're inevitably committed to some significant amount of warming over the next couple of centuries at least. The issue is how we deal with the warming we inevitably will see, and and much we can practically and economically mitigate the magnitude of that warming. At least in my first somewhat cursory skim-through of the report, I didn't get any particular feel for their position on that.

I do think there's some valuable work in this study. Unfortunately, I fear it may get lost in political wrangling over the somewhat simplistic and in my opinion unsupportable conclusions of the executve summary.