STOCKHOLM - The world’s top climate scientists Friday formally embraced an upper limit on greenhouse gases for the first time, establishing a target level at which humanity must stop spewing the gases into the atmosphere or face irreversible and potentially catastrophic climatic changes. They warned that the target likely was to be exceeded in a matter of decades unless steps are taken soon to reduce emissions.
Unveiling the latest United Nations assessment of climate science, the experts cited a extensive number of climate changes that are already underway, warned that they are likely to accelerate, and expressed virtual certainty that human activity is the main cause.
“Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time,” said Thomas Stocker, co-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N.-sponsored group of scientists that produced the report. “In short, it threatens our planet, our only home.”
The panel, in issuing its most definitive assessment yet of the risks of human-caused warming, hoped to give impetus to international negotiations toward a new climate treaty, which have languished in recent years in a swamp of technical and political disputes. The group made clear that time was not on the planet’s side if emissions continued unchecked.
“Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes,” the report said. “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”
Despite the urgency of the panel’s findings, the course of future international negotiations remains unclear, and heated opposition to climate science and to strong actions to reduce emissions is certain to continue.
Going well beyond its four previous analyses of the emissions problem, the panel endorsed a “carbon budget” for humanity - a limit on the amount of the primary greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, that can be produced by industrial activities and the clearing of forests.
To stand the best chance of keeping the planetary warming below an internationally agreed target of 3.6 degrees above the level of pre-industrial times, the panel found, no more than 1 trillion metric tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas released into the atmosphere.
Just over half that amount already has been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. At the rate energy consumption is growing, the trillionth ton will be released somewhere around 2040, according to calculations by Myles Allen, a scientist at the University of Oxford and one of the authors of the new report. More than 3 trillion tons of carbon are still left in the ground as fossil fuels, the panel said.
To keep using fossil fuels beyond the trillionth ton of emissions, companies would have to develop potentially expensive technology to capture and store carbon dioxide from emissions sources like power plants. Such efforts have been lagging; only last week, Norway scaled back one of the most ambitious such projects because of soaring costs.
But a considerable body of research suggests that in principle it could be done, and in the United States, President Barack Obama’s administration is moving toward rules that would essentially require utilities to develop the technology if they want to keep burning coal to produce electricity. In response, opponents of the plan have accused him of waging a “war on coal.”
The report is a 30-page synopsis of a larger, 900-page report that is to be released next week on the physical science of climate change. That will be followed by additional reports in 2014 on the likely impacts and on possible steps to limit the damage.
In Washington, the White House praised the new report. Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, cited increased scientific confidence “that the kinds of harm already being experienced from climate change will continue to worsen unless and until comprehensive and vigorous action to reduce emissions is undertaken worldwide.”
Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. secretary-general, spoke to delegates at the meeting Friday by video link, declaring his intention to call a meeting of heads of state in 2014, in an attempt to push such a treaty forward. The last such high-level meeting, in Copenhagen in 2009, ended in disarray.
“The heat is on,” Ban said. “Now we must act.”
Front Section, Pages 5 on 09/28/2013