Tuesday, September 18, 2007

IPCC Climate Impact Report Filled with Gloom and Doom

At a meeting held in London to launch the complete report on climate change impacts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) British climate scientist Martin Perry, who co-chairs the working group that wrote the report, had some particularly pessimistic comments to make. According to an article in the Guardian he said the following:

“We are all used to talking about these impacts coming in the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. Now we know that it’s us.”

“…we cannot mitigate out of this problem. We now have a choice between a future with a damaged world or a severely damaged world.”

“…it’s evident from the work of the IPCC that even with a maximum of a 2C we’re not going to avoid some major impacts at the regional level.”

Perry doesn’t believe that there is much chance of holding global mean temperature to a 2C increase. According to climate scientists like James Hansen going beyond 2C could push us beyond some climate tipping points that might make global warming unstoppable and eventually lead to a world that we would find unrecognizable.

Overall the picture appears to be pretty bleak and with every passing year it just seems to get bleaker.

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