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Pachauri: Climate Approaching Point of "No Return"
The Independent (U.K.), Jan. 23, 2005
Global warning has already hit the danger point that international
attempts to curb it are designed to avoid, according to the world's
top climate watchdog.
Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the official Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told an international conference
attended by 114 governments in Mauritius this month that he
personally believes that the world has "already reached the level of
dangerous concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere" and
called for immediate and "very deep" cuts in the pollution if
humanity is to "survive".
His comments rocked the Bush administration - which immediately
tried to slap him down - not least because it put him in his post
after Exxon, the major oil company most opposed to international
action on global warming, complained that his predecessor was too
"aggressive" on the issue.
A memorandum from Exxon to the White House in early 2001
specifically asked it to get the previous chairman, Dr Robert
Watson, the chief scientist of the World Bank, "replaced at the
request of the US". The Bush administration then lobbied other
countries in favour of Dr Pachauri - whom the former vice-president
Al Gore called the "let's drag our feet" candidate, and got him
elected to replace Dr. Watson, a British-born naturalised American,
who had repeatedly called for urgent action.
But this month, at a conference of Small Island Developing States on
the Indian Ocean island, the new chairman, a former head of India's
Tata Energy Research Institute, himself issued what top United
Nations officials described as a "very courageous" challenge.
He told delegates: "Climate change is for real. We have just a small
window of opportunity and it is closing rather rapidly. There is not
a moment to lose."
Afterwards he told The Independent on Sunday that widespread dying
of coral reefs, and rapid melting of ice in the Arctic, had driven
him to the conclusion that the danger point the IPCC had been set up
to avoid had already been reached.
Reefs throughout the world are perishing as the seas warm up: as
water temperatures rise, they lose their colours and turn a ghostly
white. Partly
as a result, up to a quarter of the world's corals have been
destroyed. And in November, a multi-year study by 300 scientists
concluded that the Arctic was warming twice as fast as the rest of
the world and that its ice-cap had shrunk by up to 20 per cent in
the past three decades.
The ice is also 40 per cent thinner than it was in the 1970s and is
expected to disappear altogether by 2070. And while Dr. Pachauri was
speaking, parts of the Arctic were having a January "heatwave", with
temperatures eight to nine degrees centigrade higher than normal.
He also cited alarming measurements, first reported in The
Independent on Sunday, showing that levels of carbon dioxide (the
main cause of global warming) have leapt abruptly over the past two
years, suggesting that climate change may be accelerating out of
control.
He added that, because of inertia built into the Earth's natural
systems, the world was now only experiencing the result of pollution
emitted in the 1960s, and much greater effects would occur as the
increased pollution of later decades worked its way through. He
concluded: "We are risking the ability of the human race to
survive."
FAIR
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