Global Warming is 'Twice as Bad as Previously Thought'
By Steve Connor
The Independent U.K.

Thursday 27 January 2005

Global warming might be twice as catastrophic as previously thought, flooding settlements on the British coast and turning the interior into an unrecognisable tropical landscape, the world's biggest study of climate change shows.

Researchers from some of Britain's leading universities used computer modelling to predict that under the "worst-case" scenario, London would be under water and winters banished to history as average temperatures in the UK soar up to 20C higher than at present.

Globally, average temperatures could reach 11C greater than today, double the rise predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international body set up to investigate global warming. Such high temperatures would melt most of the polar icecaps and mountain glaciers, raising sea levels by more than 20ft. A report this week in The Independent predicted a 2C temperature rise would lead to irreversible changes in the climate.

The new study, in the journal Nature, was done using the spare computing time of 95,000 people from 150 countries who downloaded from the internet the global climate model of the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research. The program, run as a screensaver, simulated what would happen if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were double those of the 18th century, before the Industrial Revolution, the situation predicted by the middle of this century.

David Stainforth of Oxford University, the chief scientist of the latest study, said processing the results showed the Earth's climate is far more sensitive to increases in man-made greenhouse gases than previously realised. The findings indicate a doubling of carbon dioxide from the pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million would increase global average temperatures by between 2C and 11C.

Mr Stainforth said: "An 11C-warmed world would be a dramatically different world... There would be large areas at higher latitudes that could be up to 20C warmer than today. The UK would be at the high end of these changes. It is possible that even present levels of greenhouse gases maintained for long periods may lead to dangerous climate change... When you start to look at these temperatures, I get very worried indeed."

Attempts to control global warming, based on the Kyoto treaty, concentrated on stabilising the emissions of greenhouse gases at 1990 levels, but the scientists warned that this might not be enough. Mr Stainforth added: "We need to accept that while greenhouse gas levels can increase we need to limit them, level them off then bring them back down again."

Professor Bob Spicer, of the Open University, said average global temperature rises of 11C are unprecedented in the long geological record of the Earth. "If we go back to the Cretaceous, which is 100 million years ago, the best estimates of the global mean temperature was about 6C higher than present," Professor Spicer said. "So 11C is quite substantial and if this is right we would be going into a realm that we really don't have much evidence for even in the rock [geological] record."

Myles Allen, of Oxford University, said: "The danger zone is not something we're going to reach in the middle of the century; we're in it now." Each of the hottest 15 years on record have been since 1980.
--------------------------
GREENS: THE U.S. MUST ACT NOW ON TIMEBOMB WARNING
FROM THE INTERNATIONAL CLIMATE CHANGE TASKFORCE

Deference by Bush, Republicans, and Democrats to
corporate interests on energy policy is
endangering the world, say Greens.


WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Green Party leaders urged the
White House, Congress, and the American people to
read and act on recommendations to prevent
catastrophic global climate change that were
published this week by the International Climate
Change Taskforce.

The report, which is posted at the web site of
the Center for American Progress
,
warns that global warming may reach a 'point of
no return' in ten years when the global average
temperature moves beyond 2°C (3.6°F) above the
pre-industrial level, with severe environmental,
food supply, and public health consequences
around the world.

"The report is consistent with the Green Party's
call for the U.S. to sign onto the Kyoto accord,
and for Kyoto to be renegotiated to include more
far-reaching measures to reduce fossil fuel
consumption and greenhouse gas emissions," said
Holly Hart, co-chair of the Platform Committee of
the Green Party of the United States. "As the
world's highest energy consumer, the U.S. must
implement such measures at home, and not wait for
other nations to catch up to us."

Greens argue that the original Kyoto goal of a
reduction of 5% to 1991 levels is severely
inadequate, and will do little to delay the
'point of no return' mentioned in the Task
Force's report.

The Task Force was convened by the Institute for
Public Policy Research in the U.K., the Center
for American Progress in the U.S., and the
Australia Institute. The report makes ten
recommendations for G8 nations to take the lead
on curbing global warming.

"The greatest barrier to enacting these steps in
the U.S. is the reluctance of public officials to
step on the toes of industry, especially energy
corporations," said Jake Schneider, treasurer of
the Green Party of the United States. "The Bush
Administration has drafted energy policy in
secret consultation with corporate lobbyists.
Many Democrats have supported increased oil
drilling in pristine public lands in Alaska,
outside of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,
and construction of new pipelines through Canada
to the U.S., and increased drilling throughout
North America. What we really need is a
conversion from our dependence on fossil fuels."


MORE INFORMATION

The Green Party of the United States
www.gp.org
1700 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 404
Washington, DC 20009.
202-319-7191, 866-41GREEN
Fax 202-319-7193

"Climate Change: Countdown to Global Catastrophe.
Report warns point of no return may be reached
in 10 years, leading to droughts, agricultural
failure and water shortages"
The Independent, January 24, 2005
news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp
www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0124-11.htm

"Global Warming is 'Twice as Bad as Previously
Thought'"
The Independent, January 27, 2005
news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp
www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0127-01.htm

-----------------------

Internet project forecasts global warming
Michael Hopkin
Biggest-ever climate simulation warns temperatures may rise by 11 ºC.

The greenhouse effect could be far more severe than experts had previously predicted, according to results from the world's biggest climate-modelling study. In the worst-case scenario, doubling carbon-dioxide levels compared with pre-industrial times increases global temperatures by an average of more than 11 ºC.

But as well as a predicting a bigger maximum rise, the project has also increased the range of possible temperature changes.

The results are the first from climateprediction.net, a project that harnesses the world's desktop computers to predict climate change. More than 90,000 people have downloaded software that uses the spare capacity of their computers to run global climate simulations.

A doubling of carbon-dioxide levels could eventually lead to an increase in worldwide temperature of anything between 1.9 ºC and 11.5 ºC, the project's researchers report in this week's Nature1. That is a far greater level of uncertainty than the 2-5 ºC rise predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The uncertainty is greater because climateprediction.net looks at more possibilities than previous models, explains the project's leader, David Stainforth of the University of Oxford, UK. Previous predictions of global warming have been based on just a few dozen simulations; Stainforth's team analysed more than 2,000.

The researchers cannot yet put a timescale on the temperature increases, although they suggest that extreme warming could take decades or centuries. Atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels, currently standing at 379 parts per million, are predicted to hit double their pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million midway through this century.

Policies aimed at keeping greenhouse-gas levels below a safe threshold may miss the point, says team member Myles Allen, a physicist at the University of Oxford. Uncertainty over global warming may mean that no such threshold can be determined; rather, we may need to keep cutting greenhouse gases for many years to come. "The danger zone is not something in the future," he says. "We're in it now."

The danger zone is not something in the future. We're in it now.

Each simulation is a different version of a programme called a general circulation model. This model divides the globe into thousands of sectors, and estimates the future temperature based on certain assumptions such as cloud coverage, the rate of heat movement and rainfall rates.

Previous studies have included only the most probable values for these factors, whereas climateprediction.net's power has allowed the researchers to investigate two or three settings for each parameter.

The project's final predictions are based on the 2,017 simulations that were able to mimic the current climate. All predicted temperature rises. Most were about 3.4 ºC, the average value predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; many were far more severe.

The researchers plan to improve their models, including a more sophisticated picture of how heat travels through the oceans, regional data and a more accurate picture of how temperatures will change during this century. "There's a huge database of which we've hardly scratched the surface," comments team member Mat Collins of Britain's Met Office in Exeter.

Meanwhile, they hope that more users will volunteer their spare computing power through climateprediction.net "There's lots and lots more to do," says Stainforth.